


The Angel Whisperer, Part 1: Seraph

by rudolphsb9



Series: The Angel Whisperer [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cults, Freeform - Weeping Angels, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Violent Sex, Weeping Angels - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-03 01:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11521785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rudolphsb9/pseuds/rudolphsb9
Summary: Rastan Jovanich wrote the definitive work on the Weeping Angels, the only one in the universe. The knowledge he possessed, some of which made it into the book, is said to have driven him mad, and may have led to his subsequent disappearance.The best place to start with such stories is at the beginning.





	1. Prologue

Rastan Jovanich sighed a little, leaning back on the dolly to wheel a stack of four or five cases of various stock to the back door for some of his coworkers to unload and put in its proper place. When the dolly was unloaded, he wheeled it back to the truck for another round. He stopped suddenly, his grip on the dolly loosening. The air took on a strange density to it, as if it were humid and thick with…something other than rain. His vision of the back alley behind the superstore where he worked faded away, replaced by something more beautiful than anything he had ever seen.

He saw a massive nova, stretching what seemed like the borders of the universe. It looked hot and varied so vividly across the spectrum of light that he almost couldn’t imagine the colors he was seeing, and certainly had no names for them. He spotted a handful of stars, but most of the heat and light and color was provided by the vast nebula of the universe. He watched the gases coalesce before his eyes, inching ever closer to stars, to constellations perhaps. One star dominated his vision, a great ball of gas struggling to take the proper form. The star finally condensed, but ceased to burn properly. Rastan watched the star try again and again and again, until it finally splintered into rocks, the first rocks in the universe. The rocks, great boulders perhaps larger than the earth, coalesced by sheer force of gravity alone. The way they struck each other caused them to rotate around an axis, picking up the rest of the rocks along the way and ultimately forming something that looked like a bead, or a bagel. Phenomenal.

He watched as the planet approached, as if he were the one coming in for a landing. It was rocky, with high jagged mountains and uneven ground everywhere he could see. The massive ball of gas still baked the universe, including the planet itself. Much of the surface glowed red from it. His vision stopped in front of a cliff face, sheer and stretching into the arms of the universe itself. He looked up at the sky, awash in orange and red and shot through with purples and reds and dozens of other, nameless and beautiful colors. When he looked back at the cliff, however, he saw something…strange. Dust particles seemed to splinter or…peel off from the cliff face. It was as if the rock was morphing, like a great cell budding or mitosing into two. The dust cloud swirled in front of him, and Rastan drew back a little, instinctively. The cloud took a vaguely familiar shape, and it made a sound, maybe the first sound in the whole universe. Except there was no atmosphere, so how could there be a noise? No matter, for Rastan recognized the sound at once, knew it for its type. He’d grown up around those sounds, sometimes a dozen of them. And he recognized the tone, too. This new creature seemed…confused about the place it found itself, not sure where or…what…it was. Rastan watched as it reached out, feeling the rock and taking its first steps, looking at the sky and the world around it and eventually, right at Rastan’s position. He froze, as if the creature could see right through him, as if he could see the creature, or he were affected by its laws and could not move while it watched him. It moved closer to him, gliding over the hot rock until Rastan could make out some details of its particulate face.

He stumbled backward, nearly tripping over his own feet and almost falling as he pulled himself out of the patch of haze, or whatever it was. He managed to regain his footing, but his head continued to spin, and he found himself possessed of a wave of nausea. He hunched over, one hand holding back his hair while he wretched. Up came his meager lunch, as well as a small puddle’s worth of acid, and after a few more moments of dry heaving, he coughed and sputtered some, wiped his face on the back of his arm, sniffed, and straightened. “Shit,” he muttered, scanning his surroundings. He was the only one still out, and he glanced at the bracelet on his left wrist, only to find that it had glitched out. He tapped the display screen briefly, to no response. The thing looked completely fried.

Rastan glanced at the back of the store, watching one of his coworkers run to the dry storage shed for something seemingly important, and he turned and, after a few deep breaths for bravery, ran.

***

The sun filtered through the buildings as Rastan wove a path through the old Czech district where he grew up. Sometimes the place was called the Temple District, by virtue of the hundreds-years-old cults that dotted the neighborhood. Rastan passed a pair of Weeping Angels, standing on plinths at the “official” entrance to the neighborhood. One had an arm over its face and the other hand delicately out to the side, and the other was covering its face with both hands. Rastan glanced up as he passed, to find that they had looked at him. He paused, watching them a moment, before continuing on. He hadn’t been in this part of London in the better part of a decade, so of course they would be curious about what he was doing here.

He turned and walked along the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets. There were dozens of resonances in this neighborhood, forming a familiar backdrop in his mind that translated to a series of songs, all playing at once on top of each other. It was the white noise of his youth, and had a strange comforting effect on him even now. He was surprised at how much he had missed it.

Rastan continued until he reached the façade of a temple he recognized. There were two pillars, on top of which stood two statues of Angels, one arm over their eyes and another down at their side. He glanced between them, and couldn’t find a difference in their pose at all. If he remembered correctly, it must be time for evening prayer. Rastan walked up the steps and gently opened one of the doors just enough to slip inside, dipping his fingers into the bowl of holy water and anointing both of his wrists. He took a seat in the last pew and stared at the front of the room while the pontiff kneeled in front of a candelabrum that stood before an Angel. There were six others standing at the altar area, around such an assortment of candles that Rastan detected, as usual, an element of fear around dealing with the Angels. The pontiff was reading in Czech from a holy book and rocking back and forth slightly. Rastan recognized the prayers.

He closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the pontiff, letting the words flow through him to the undercurrent of the songs of the Angels, and exhaled heavily but quietly. He opened his eyes again when he realized the pontiff had stopped speaking, instead looking at the back of the chapel. Rastan’s eyes went from him to one of the Angel statues, a hand out to him as if it were beckoning him forward. Rastan stood slowly and approached the altar almost reluctantly.

_Rastan._

The voice echoed in his mind, as if the Angel had spoken English, although he knew very well that the Angels had no voices, and the songs he heard were on a quantum level, not actual sound.

_Rastan. Do us all a favor and tell him to get to the point._

“S-s-she has a message for you,” Rastan stammered to the pontiff. He immediately stood, watching Rastan.

“Are you sure? Do they speak to you?”

Rastan hated phrases like that; he had always understood where they were coming from, in the sense of emotional impressions, but this was just as new as anything else. But he knew that wouldn’t make sense to these people. “I had a vision,” he explained. It wasn’t much, but for now it would have to do. “She would like for you to find the point and get to it, save us all a lot of time and energy.”

“Do you speak the truth?”

“Would you like her to back me up on this? Something tells me that wouldn’t be good for your health, Pontiff.” The candles flickered in response.

“O-of course,” the pontiff said, thumbing through the book and finding the meat of the usual prayer. He cleared his throat and resumed. When he looked at the Angel again, she had returned to her usual place and position. He returned to the pew in the back, and as he walked, it settled in.

He may never leave….


	2. Chapter One

TWO WEEKS LATER

The TARDIS made a characteristic wheezing sound as it landed, before making a heavy thunk and falling silent. The Doctor immediately went to the door and stepped out, assessing his new surroundings. It was London, for sure, and it looked like the year 225-something. He glanced at the screen in the TARDIS: 2257; not bad, he thought to himself as he stepped out and closed the door behind him. He looked around, assessing things and scanning about, seemingly randomly, with his sonic screwdriver. Everything, down to the air, was right for Earth in the mid-twenty-third century. Nothing seemed out of place. And that, in itself, was odd.

The Doctor frowned and pocketed the screwdriver, taking a walk down the nearest sidewalk. There were so few people out, which struck the Doctor as unusual, but what few people were present did, indeed, pause to look up at him. He barely paid them any mind, instead glancing at street signs to get his bearings. He guessed that he was near the new Czech neighborhood that sprung up a couple hundred years prior, a result of some panic about Russia and Ukraine, and people who wanted somewhere safe to stay to ride out the storm.

He pulled out his sonic screwdriver again and scanned the air for a moment, before glancing at the device and scowling. “Oh, now that’s odd,” he muttered, and he glanced at two plinths, where a Weeping Angel stood on each. Both hands covered their faces. The Doctor scanned each one. “What’re you doing here?” he couldn’t help but ask. Naturally, the Angels stood silently, as if assessing him. The Doctor turned and glanced at the road signs in the neighborhood, in Czech and English. He held up the sonic, fiddling a bit with the settings and letting it emit an insistent, high-pitched hum. “Of all the places in the city you choose here to congregate en masse. Why?” When he looked back at them, they pointed, not at him or each other, but down the street. The Doctor saw no reason not to proceed, so he went forward.

The neighborhood immediately had a much different feel than the greater London metropolitan area. It seemed somewhat less “modern,” comparatively speaking, with brick buildings and statues of Angels absolutely everywhere, often with dedicated plinths or alcoves. He scanned a small sample of them and determined that the Angels had not been carved, but the plinths and alcoves had. Humans had given them a place to live. He hummed, frowning at the readings and pocketing his sonic again. The Angels were watching him, but so far none had made a move to approach him. He continued on, looking around at the rest of his surroundings.

There seemed to be an elaborate church on every corner, some painted green and trimmed gold and others painted red. Either way the colors were always dark and muted, as if…as if something bright and bold would offend the Angels’ sensibilities. Each church had a courtyard, adorned with statues, and a few of them also contained graves in the hundreds. The Doctor stopped in front of one of the graveyards and entered slowly through the gate. He glanced at the Angels, noting six or seven in the courtyard, and observed their behavior. Some had taken up positions amidst the graves, but there was a corner they all seemed to avoid. He walked along the paths to this corner and bent into a crouch to study a few of the graves. They were all of children who hadn’t lived past two years old. “Angels don’t kill children, certainly not by breaking their necks. These kids had their whole lives ahead of them,” he said, standing after a moment.

“Pokřtěné,” said a voice behind him, and he looked over his shoulder at a young, olive-skinned boy with black hair. It looked like half his hair had been buzzed off, and he caught glimpses of bandages. There was a soft bulge under his clothes on one shoulder, suggesting another bandage. A third set poked out from under the shirtsleeve on his left wrist. “The children who died during the baptism,” he went on, approaching. He was holding a rake, as if he’d been in the middle of grounds work when he noticed the Doctor and assumed he was paying his respects. “The adults hypocritically treat them like they’re some kind of holy being, but the truth is they’re a sad, sad case.” He shook his head a little.

The Doctor regarded him as he carefully leaned the rake against the short brick wall that separated the courtyard from whatever was beyond. “You’re aware this graveyard is full of Weeping Angels, are you not?” he finally said, as if he had finally chosen a topic to open the conversation with.

“Oh I know. They’ve been here for about two hundred years.”

“Subsisting on what?”

The boy laughed, a soft, slightly dark laugh. “That’s the problem with the cults here,” he said. “Angels either play with them or eat them, and for as many cults that are still standing, there are six where the Angels got fed up and ate everyone. There’s always stories of someone yelling something like ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ right before dying. It’s not being forsaken at all, really.” He returned and looked at the Doctor, clasping his hands loosely behind him. “All this shit about holiness is a fucking farce,” he said bluntly.

“Then why are you not dead?” the Doctor blurted out, watching the youth walk over to the other side of the courtyard, a wrought iron fence with a gate. He bent over and picked up a pack of cigarettes, almost empty, and a lighter. He removed one of the last cigarettes from the pack and lit it easily. He’d been doing this a long time. The Doctor watched him take a drag and exhale the smoke into the sky, watching it form aimless patterns for a moment.

“I’m not dead because I can hear them,” he said after a moment, still staring skyward.

“What do you mean, you can hear them?”

“I used to get emotional impressions; I could tell what they were feeling. Those children whose graves you were examining did die in the baptism ceremony, but the Angels didn’t kill them.”

“So what did?”

“Other humans.” He took another drag off the cigarette. “Simply put. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but when you present your child to a terrifying intergalactic predator, especially one that can’t help but exude uncontrollable rage, well, some children pick up on that, freak out, and shit happens.” He shrugged again and inhaled from the cigarette. When he exhaled, it came out like a heavy sigh. “I used to be able to tell those sorts of things, but I had no idea how to communicate this until I had a firmer grasp on language. But by then I figured it was obvious. Everyone else could feel it too. When I figured out that wasn’t true, that was my first clue that this little ‘religion’…” He shrugged again. “One hundred percent bullshit.”

“You were _raised_ in one of these churches!” The youth nodded.

“Not great fun, if you ask me. I didn’t exactly have a social life growing up.”

“Well I can imagine. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“About how I can hear them?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t know how. I guess it’s an accident of genetics. The people in there are circulating this notion that I’m some kind of prophet.” He gestured with his thumb to the church, then sighed and lowered the cigarette, flicking ash off the tip with his thumb and staring off down the street. “Something else happened, too.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I explained to the pontiff that I had a holy vision. Except there’s not really anything holy about it. I did see things, though.”

“What sort of things?”

Here the youth regarded him and frowned slightly. “You’re not another crazy cultist, are you? If I tell a cultist what I saw in my vision they tend to…do strange things.”

“I’m the Doctor.”

He glanced at one of the Angels, as if for confirmation, before nodding. “Despite you looking like a tasty morsel to them they’re holding off. Apparently you’ve got a reputation of flying off the handle.”

“Well…”

He cleared his throat. “I saw the formation of the oldest Weeping Angel in the universe,” he said. “Simply put.” He took another drag.

“You… _saw_ this?” The youth nodded. “You saw something from…from the beginning _of the universe_!”

“Roughly so.” He took another drag and flicked off more ash.

“How?”

The youth looked up. “Much easier if I show you.”

***

“So, who are you?” the Doctor asked as they walked briskly down the streets of London. They had left the Czech neighborhood behind blocks ago, the Angels watching them leave.

“Rastan Jovanich,” the youth replied, leading the Doctor through the streets to the superstore he’d fled from earlier that month.

“R-Rastan! Rastan Jovanich!” the Doctor said, surprised. “ _The_ Rastan Jovanich?”

“I become famous in the future?”

The Doctor bit his lip a little. “Right. You don’t know about all that. This is just the start for you. Wait—how did you know I was a time traveler?”

“The Angel’s exact words were, and I quote, ‘The Doctor, crazy time traveler, his time stream literally makes no sense, also randomly threatens genocide every so often.’”

“It’s not _random_!” he insisted.

“You’re not denying the genocide part?” The Doctor remained silent, which Rastan noted. He had spotted the superstore by then anyway. “Right over here,” he said, crossing the street on a slant. The Doctor jogged a little to keep up with him, and they continued at an even pace until they reached the loading docks behind the superstore. “You can still see my vomit stains. I was standing about here.” He pointed at a spot near where he was currently standing, and the Doctor approached, his sonic screwdriver at the ready.

He scanned the area, moving somewhat methodically until the sound the sonic made changed, and he frowned and hummed slightly. He made another few passes, mapping out the area of the anomaly. To Rastan’s eyes it looked as though there was nothing there, but he remembered the feel, the density of that one patch of air that showed him the early universe. He looked at his sonic, frowning at the readings. “What happened?” he asked Rastan.

“I was unloading. I help with the trucks three times a week, kind of a promotion, since I got actual pay for that rather than being a cashier. I was coming back to the truck for another round of stock for the others to put away, when I staggered into that.” He pointed to the invisible anomaly. “Then I stopped seeing the back alley and started seeing the nova at the beginning of the universe. I think it was a nova. It was a bunch of hot gas glowing all kinds of colors. There were a few stars maybe? I think I saw the universe’s first planet. Or sort of a planet, if you count things that look like bagels.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Bagels. It looked like a bagel. Or a bead. Like God was waiting to thread a needle through it.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t believe God is the Weeping Angels, if that makes sense.”

“Good stance,” the Doctor said, scanning the anomaly again and studying his sonic screwdriver. “Weeping Angels are far from divine or angelic.”

“I figured.”

“But I have wondered,” he said almost idly, “what use _do_ Angels have for human servants?”

“Oh, nothing, really. Easy snacks on hand, but that’s really a bonus. They get a lot of joy out of playing with humans in general, or some do it out of anger and to see how far they can humiliate the humans just for fun. Vengeance.”

“Oh, now that sounds like the Weeping Angels.” He held up the sonic screwdriver again and scanned it, as if there were a tiny screen on it that Rastan couldn’t see.

“What is it?” he asked.

The Doctor took a deep breath. “You stepped into a…tear…in space-time. It showed you the early universe even though that’s not how space-time should work.”

“Why?”

“Well, most people perceive time linearly, and they should. Otherwise they’d go mad.”

“Well that explains a lot.”

The Doctor turned and looked at him, as if offended. Then his face smoothed over. “Alright, I am mad, but that’s beside the point.”

“What is the point, then?” Rastan challenged, folding his arms over his chest.

“The point is that time is generally nonlinear. It’s a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…” He gestured vaguely in the air, as if his very fingers were the metaphor he was going for. Rastan merely cocked an eyebrow. “Time is nonlinear, for the most part, except people don’t experience it that way. The thing is some people do. Me, for instance. Weeping Angels, as well. Or rather, they force others to in order to feed.” Rastan bit his lip and nodded a little. “You knew and you associate with them on the regular.”

“Like I said, I can hear them. Pretend you’re a gazelle, OK? But you’re a weird gazelle, you can speak lion. Imagine how freaked out the lions would be to discover this.”

The Doctor nodded. “Right, that would be weird,” he said softly.

“So, what’s the deal with the tear in space-time?” Rastan asked.

“I’m not sure.” With that, he started walking toward the back entrance. Rastan shrugged a little and followed, dropping his hands to his sides.


	3. Chapter Two

Kirby Callaghan looked up, tired already even though his day was half-over as it was and he would have to be up early the next day regardless. He recognized Rastan well enough, and it looked like the kid had finally gotten ahold of clothes that weren’t slept in half a dozen times. The tall man, he didn’t recognize, but he was holding up a leather wallet and introducing himself as an inspector from Scotland Yard. “We need security footage of the back alley from two weeks ago,” he said, folding the wallet again and tucking it back into a coat pocket. Rastan glanced at the man briefly but otherwise said nothing.

“Alright,” Kirby said, hauling himself to his feet. He started toward a door and unlocked it, using an old-fashioned metal key. When he pushed open the door, he revealed to Rastan and the detective walls of screens. “You probably want this screen,” he said, pointing to a shot of the back alley where the loading docks were. He bent to check the monitor ID number and then moved to a series of boxes, running his index finger over them before finding the right one. Rastan helped him move some boxes out of the way while he hefted that one onto a table. “You’re lucky we actually have a proper filing system,” he noted, as he pulled out a CD. “Rastan’s episode.” He handed the CD to the detective.

The man took the CD and took a step toward a player, inserting the disk and pressing a button. Rastan watched him, looking somewhat easy, as if he were unsure about what he would find. “You OK, kid?” Kirby asked.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah,” Rastan replied, glancing at him, nodding, and looking back at the Doctor. “I’m fine.”

Kirby nodded. “Good to hear it. They’ve been tearing the city apart looking for you.”

“I figured.”

The detective gave a triumphant “Ha!” as he got the player up and running and an image filled the screen connected to the player. Rastan bit his lip a little as he watched himself wheel the dolly back from dropping off some of the stock at the back door, fully intending to pick up some more.

“Weird, watching yourself, isn’t it?” Kirby asked.

Rastan nodded a little, watching the tiny image of himself stop suddenly, letting the dolly roll before it settled to a stop near the end of the loading docks. He stood like such a dope, almost like he was half-suspended, his knees bent and his hands out to his sides slightly. But here, it appeared as though half of him had been caught up in a vortex, all purple and midnight blue, peppered with stars. “So, that’s what a temporal tear looks like on tape,” the detective said.

“It goes on like this for another forty-five minutes,” Kirby said. “Gets weirder, too.” The detective settled in, as if giddy to watch the show. Kirby gently pulled Rastan aside. “Is he really a detective?” he asked in a low voice.

“It’s complicated,” Rastan replied, equally softly.

“Well you know I can’t let just anyone in here.”

“What’s it matter? Ellerhard doesn’t come by anyway. I don’t even think he gives a—”

“Ellerhard, who is he?” the detective asked, snapping his fingers and pointing at Rastan.

“Arthur Ellerhard, CEO of Ganymede User Systems,” Kirby explained in his stead. The man paled a little as he stood, turning to face them. “They make the bracelets that keep track of people’s employees for them, keeping track of everyone and making sure they obey the laws.”

“Laws, what laws?”

“Labor laws,” Rastan said. “Required to work starting at sixteen, fifteen minute breaks max, thirteen hour days minimum, and the bracelet regulates you strictly. Each industry has rules of conduct, so you get punished for breaking those, too.” He held up his left wrist, still bandaged, and pulled it down to reveal pale lines snaking up to his elbow. “Honestly some days you’re lucky if you can get a meal and some sleep in before you have to be ready for the next day.”

“And the pay is shite,” Kirby added.

“Provided they pay you at all. You can get fined.”

“For dying?” the detective asked.

“God it feels that way sometimes,” Kirby replied.

Rastan frowned at something on the screen, and the detective and Kirby turned to look. Flickering on and off the screen were forms of Angels covering their faces. Their number varied, from one to as many as five. “Oh…oh this isn’t good, this is very not good,” the detective said, scanning the screen with a strange device before looking at it as if there were a tiny screen that displayed readings. “They’ve never done that before. Usually they want to hang around as long as possible,” he added, as if to himself. “Get in your head, under your skin.”

“There’s no resonance,” Rastan noted. “It’s like they really are just recordings.” He bent forward, his hands on his knees as he studied the image and the Angels that flickered in and out of existence. “Where did they come from?” he asked. “They weren’t there before and they weren’t there after, unless I missed something?”

One Angel in particular caught his eye, flickering back and forth in front of the portal, hand out as if to touch the image of Rastan, but not to send him back in time. Rastan could tell that much pretty much instantly. He knit his brows together and frowned. “It has no power,” he muttered. “So why…” He straightened suddenly and backed away, cocking his head as if he couldn’t believe it was real. Kirby didn’t ask what.

“I hate to sound like one of those religious nutjobs, Rastan,” the detective said, “but I think it’s trying to send you a message.”

***

“A message?” Rastan asked, after Kirby told them they should leave before someone noticed the presence of ‘unauthorized personnel’, and they started back across the back alley. “What kind of message?”

“I don’t know yet,” the Doctor replied. “But knowing Angels, it’s either ‘we’re coming to eat you’, or ‘get the hell off our turf’.” Rastan stopped in front of the temporal tear, turning to face it. “What are you doing?” the Doctor asked.

“I’m curious about something,” Rastan replied, reaching out to touch the tear, searching with his fingers for the change in density. After a moment, he found it, and he started to get a little heady. His other hand went to his face.

The Doctor watched him, taking the time to note the bandages that covered much of the back of his head. “What happened?” he asked. “To your head?”

“Before you say anything, it was a mutual arrangement,” Rastan replied, lowering his hand and taking a step back. “She bit me, too.” He pulled on his shirt, revealing the bandage on his shoulder. The Doctor stared. “You think Angels are all soft and squishy when you can’t see them? Sure they’ve got soft bits, and sharp bits. They’re kind of like…Schrodinger’s weapon. It’s neither until you can figure out what it is. Usually in the dark.”

“It’s terrifying that you know that.”

“I know more than that,” Rastan said with a wink. “The one who did this, he’s usually feistier.”

“I thought—”

“Angel gender is weird.”

“They have gender?”

“Of course they do. Some have a preference one way or the other, others oscillate between them, sometimes frequently. Schrodinger’s gender. Now that I think about it, Angels _personify_ the uncertainty principle.”

“I’d believe it.”

“Only reason it doesn’t show is they can never look at each other. Never evolved secondary sex characteristics. Or at least, not visible ones. There is this really weird biological holdover, though.”

“Oh?”

“Dubbed the Mating Phalluses. Exactly what you think it is.”

“I…don’t want to know.”

Rastan chuckled a little. “Don’t tell the grandkids.”

“I’m nobody’s grandfather! OK perhaps I am, but that’s not the point. Did you find anything, by the way?”

“Nothing really, just that…Angel again.”

“What did she look like?”

“She almost had shape but it was like looking at a cloud, or a…patch of haze.”

“Of course, you don’t count as an observer if you’re having a vision.” The Doctor passed the sonic screwdriver over Rastan.

“What?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. Why you, of all people, all possible people and points in time in the universe, are the way you are.”

“Probably genetics, like I said.”

“Well you seem to have come at just the right time.” The Doctor jumped into the next sentence almost, but had gotten only a syllable or two out before a device in Rastan’s pocket began ringing. Rastan frowned a little and reached for it, fumbling a little with the over-sized shirt he was given. He removed a small square on two bands, somewhat like a watch.

“Hello?” he asked, after pressing a button on the side.

“Rastan, there’s a new statue,” said the pontiff. “We would like you there for the conse—”

“Wait…new statue? What kind of shape is it in? Weathering, anything like that?”

“W-w-well…” The pontiff laughed nervously, and Rastan could imagine him tugging at the collar of his robe.

“Get out of there! Pontiff! Get out of there now!” For a moment there was silence. “Pontiff? Pontiff, are you there?” There was no response. Rastan pursed his lips and shook his head a little, as if he wanted to throw the watch as far away from him as physically possible and call the pontiff an idiot. “We have to go,” he said. “We have to get back there, now.” Without waiting to see if the Doctor would follow, Rastan ran.

***

The two of them returned to the Temple within the half-hour, to find many of the congregants fleeing and screaming, huddling in the street or taking off for sanctuary at a nearby church. Rastan glanced at the churchyard, but it didn’t look very changed. One of the Angels had moved, however, kneeling on the plinth and splaying her wings upward. He looked at the main building, where the Doctor was checking the locks with his sonic screwdriver, and stepped past him into the chapel. A weathered, but recognizable statue stood in the middle of the space, approximately two dozen broken bodies littering the floor around it. Rastan stopped, staring at the bodies and then at the Angel, wingless and rough looking. _You must be starving,_ he thought. “Why not eat all these people. Why kill them this way?”

“Great question,” the Doctor said, and Rastan looked at him, realizing he had spoken aloud. The Doctor scanned the Angel and frowned. “What motivated you to just…break all their necks? Why not eat their time energy?”

“Fury,” Rastan said suddenly, frowning and looking at the Doctor. “Starving as she is, she’s angrier than that.”

“So this is vengeance?”

Rastan nodded. “She killed just enough of the congregants to have the strength to break the necks of the others.”

“Why?”

“Won’t say.” He shook his head a little, and the Doctor regarded the Angel again.

“The one thing I know Angels to do is have a reason,” he said softly. “Even if that reason is to torment its victims.” He watched the Angel, carefully avoiding the eyes. “You’re angry enough to ignore your hunger and break the necks of twenty people. What happened to you?”

Rastan scanned the fallen, noting that the pontiff must’ve been one of the appetizers. He carefully stepped over them, scanning their faces and searching his mind for some kind of connection, and something caught his eye. He carefully walked over and picked up a length of broken chain, with a mangled cuff hanging on to one end by a thread. “Doctor!” he said, turning to face the man.

The Doctor looked at him and stared at the chain, and after a moment he walked over to Rastan, also carefully stepping over the bodies. “Oh, that would do it,” he said. “That would do it to any Angel.” He reached over and took the chain, studying it, letting one end hang while he scanned it with the sonic. “The chain is modern, well, modern-ish. It’s only strong enough to contain a severely weakened Weeping Angel, and even then with enough rage…. Something tells me this wasn’t the only chain, though. Someone cared a lot about holding you.”

Rastan looked back at the dead, studying them for a moment. “I’ll need your help to cover them, Doctor,” he said finally. He didn’t know where the Angel would go after this, or what she would do, but for now, it appeared that her rampage was over with, if only because she was too tired to continue.


	4. Chapter Three

“The Ancient Ones have spoken, have acted definitively in the lives of these faithful,” said the minister at the front of the chapel, where the photographs of everyone taken or killed were on display in front, around, and behind him. The altar was covered with flowers, to the point where the usual candlesticks remained hidden. “They have chosen which of us to send to Heaven, and which are still too full of sin for such…merciful death. These loyal men and women serve as reminders that try as we may to serve the Ancient Ones, they are the ultimate arbiters in our fate. We should never forget this.”

“They believe this?” the Doctor asked Rastan in a very low whisper as they sat in one of the back pews.

Rastan nodded. “Just go with it,” he said, just as softly.

“The Angels have sent one of their own to work their will, and their will is absolute. We may have been led astray, or perhaps they feel we need a reminder. No matter the case, never forget the Angels’ presence in our lives is strong and omnipresent. They need no justification for their acts, and we can only pray they are merciful with us. More than that, we can only know that those among us who were taken were sent to heaven, and those who were not taken will need to be cleansed in the afterlife, as we all will need to be cleansed. For now, let us pray for our saints and our sinners. May the journey be easy for them all.” The minister bowed his head, as well as the rest of the congregation.

Rastan followed suit easily, but the Doctor was reluctant. All he could think during these moments of silence was, _Are these people actually_ praying _to the Weeping Angels?_

***

Rastan sat on the steps of the church after the service had cleared away after the service. Most people had gone to the wake, but he chose to stay behind, at least long enough to finish a smoke. He heard the Doctor’s footsteps as he left the church and slowly sat on the step next to him. “Do they not know how dangerous it is, what they just did?” he asked. Rastan looked at him.

“I think they do, on some level,” Rastan replied. “Every altar is covered in candles and candle holders of some type or another. Many of them burn constantly, and are continuously maintained and replaced. There’s a reason for the saying: There is always a light burning in the Temple.” Rastan took another drag and exhaled, staring out over the street. “I told you it was all bullshit,” he said, looking at the Doctor again.

“Are you afraid?”

“Sometimes.”

“Good. It’s good to be afraid. Sometimes.”

“It helps to know which Angels to avoid, otherwise you end up trying to avoid all of them. Though, now that I think about it, that’s not actually such a bad idea.” Rastan inhaled again and considered while the smoke swirled in his mouth, before sighing. “A lot of them are sadistic, which manifests differently for each Angel. Some like to toy with their victims, others prefer torture in a more classical sense. That’s when they’re not starving to death. When they are, well…they become animalistic.” He took another drag. “Remember that gazelle analogy? The gazelle has a right to fear the lion, regardless of understanding it in the first place. The lion, if hungry enough, _will_ eat that gazelle. It’s the gazelle’s primary job to know when to stay out of the way.” Rastan looked back at the church across the street and flicked ash off the end of his cigarette. “I’m really in a bit of a pickle, the way I’ve described it.”

“Indeed you are.”

Rastan took a long pull off the cigarette, taking a moment to watch the Angels around the neighborhood, noting that a few of them had moved while no one was looking. “There’s more of them doing that,” he said, referring to the three or four Angels he spotted kneeling on their plinths, wings splayed skyward. The Doctor looked at him. “There was one posed like that in the graveyard.”

The Doctor looked at one of the Angels, studying its pose, the hands over its face. He stood and walked over, and Rastan snuffed his cigarette on the step before following him. The Doctor stopped in front of the Angel and studied her, scanning her with the sonic.

“What is it?” Rastan asked when he caught up.

“Why is this one posed this way?”

Rastan studied the Angel. “Reverence,” he said. “At least, I think so.”

“Of whom?”

Rastan frowned, studying the other Angels that had adopted the pose. “Why are only a few Angels posed this way and not the others?”

“Ooo, that’s a good question, I like that question,” the Doctor said. “A question with substance, that sees the bigger picture, or at least hints at it.” He turned flicked his sonic and pocketed it again before turning to the street, studying the statues who bowed as well as the ones who did not. “Why?” he asked softly. “Simply put I don’t understand the gesture, let alone why some partake and others do not. I never knew Angels to have anyone they…revered. They seem to detest the entire concept of servitude.”

“They do,” Rastan replied. When he thought about it, he had to admit that it was just as puzzling as the Doctor found it.

“The Angel who caused all this, where is she?”

“I don’t know. Follow the bowing Angels?”

“Ooo, good plan. I’ll go this way, you go that way,” the Doctor said. “Also let me see your little device.” Rastan pulled the square from his pocket and held it up for the Doctor to see. He fiddled with the sonic screwdriver and nodded. “We’re now in contact, we can call each other if something goes wrong, or there’s a lead.”

“Is there anything that thing can’t do?” Rastan asked.

“Wood,” the Doctor replied. “There still isn’t a proper wood setting, I should get on that.”

“Um…noted…” He pocketed the square again and turned to walk down the street, while the Doctor walked in the opposite direction.

***

Rastan buried his hands in his pockets, glancing at the people still filtering into one of the Temple buildings for the wake. The people considered it a holy celebration and usually sought intercession for the ones not zapped back in time. Of course, in Rastan’s experience, the Angels themselves never cared, or sometimes found the activity distasteful. He thought briefly about what would happen to him if he tried to communicate this to people who had been worshipping them for two hundred years, all risks included. He supposed he would be locked in Sanctuary with one of the Angels, to be “screened” as a false prophet and a deceiver; there were three possible outcomes to that, and two of them were death in some way. He wasn’t liking those odds. Then, one death was considered holy while the other merely a sentence to purgatory. He didn’t recall anyone being _released_ from Sanctuary with the Angels, and it would probably blow the minds of absolutely everyone and cause community-wide controversy. Rastan paused to ask himself if he wanted to deal with that. Probably not, he decided, continuing on.

There were only a few bowing Angels on this section of the street, and when he peered down alleys, he hadn’t spotted any yet. He wondered if they were way off course, and maybe they were, but they had to start somewhere. People had died and the religious explanation hadn’t satisfied Rastan one bit. He reached into his pocket and removed the square. “Doctor, come in,” he said.

“Hello, Rastan,” the Doctor replied over their comm line. “Anything?”

“A few more bowing Angels, but nothing else. You?”

“Nothing of note. Except I have the distinct feeling all these Angels are watching me.”

“They probably are.”

“That’s comforting,” the Doctor said wryly. “Keep going. I’ll turn around and catch up with you.”

“Alright.” Rastan pocketed the square again and paused suddenly, looking around him. He was still in the Czech square, but something felt different about this corner of the neighborhood. It was quiet, and there hadn’t been a temple in blocks. This certainly wasn’t a corner that the Czech neighborhood was known for. He stood in the middle of the street and looked around, listening with a sixth sense he had come to hone rather keenly over the years. After a moment he smiled. “There you are,” he said with a soft smile, and he walked into one of the abandoned church buildings, where the boards over the door had been broken in.

A bare bulb flickered overhead, causing shadows to dance over the form of an Angel, back turned to him for the most part, hands over her face. He studied the floor, littered with different people’s belongings. The homeless and fugitives who had lived here had vanished. “You ate them all,” Rastan said. “Most of them didn’t even stand a chance.” The lights continued to flicker, and the Angel turned her face toward him, serene and expressionless but with a hint of mild curiosity—or maybe that was Rastan’s imagination. He focused specifically on her resonance, trying to gauge how she was doing, and then something struck him. He’d heard this before.

“It’s…It can’t be…” he said finally, taking a couple of steps toward her.

_Who are you?_ The voice was clear and strong in his mind, but heavy with something like time, or infinity, or constant pain.

“M-m-my name’s Rastan,” he said. “Rastan Jovanich.”

_That’s not what I meant._

Rastan nodded. “You must mean how I can…do this. Well…I don’t…know.”

_I see. In that case, you’re a stupid son of a bitch._

The lights flickered again, and the Angel turned impossibly fast, facing him with her hands up, claws and fangs bared in a snarl. “Keep looking at that Angel!” yelled a voice behind him.

“Hello, Doctor,” Rastan replied, leaning slightly toward him while watching the Angel. But, as the lights flickered, the snarl dropped, and the Angel drew back a little. “Do you two know each other?”

The Doctor walked into the room and studied the Angel intently, his eyes and hands running over slender, almost feminine limbs they both knew belied precisely how deadly the creature in front of them could be. He studied her neck, the side of her face, even one of her wings, before he finally stepped back, turning to Rastan. Rastan glanced at him briefly before looking back at the Angel. Besides the slight shift in movement of her wings, the Angel didn’t move. The Doctor stepped back, studying the Angel. “It can’t be,” he said. “She has six wings, not two. And those marks are fresh.”

“It’s her,” Rastan said, studying her face intently and remembering the version of it he saw in his vision, his human mind trying to make sense of a quantum, possibly four-dimensional being. That, and he recognized the song, as well. In fact, he’d probably go so far as to say it was an exact match.

“How can you tell?”

“Resonance is like fingerprints, but for Angels. Each one sounds different. Even what we would consider twins.”

“So you’re sure?” Rastan nodded. The Doctor stepped back, watching the Angel still. “You’re young still,” he said to the Angel. “You probably haven’t met me yet, too early in your time stream. But you’re out of place, aren’t you. You shouldn’t be here.” His hand hovered gently over the Angel’s face, as if tenderly wanting to touch her but not sure if that would be rude or not.

“What happened?” Rastan asked the Angel, acting on a hunch and wondering if he could put this talent of his to some good use for once. For a moment there was apparent silence, while the Doctor watched Rastan watching the Angel. “She says she doesn’t remember much. She remembers hunting life on a rocky planet somewhere in the universe, going about business as usual, and the next thing she’s aware of, she was strapped to a table somewhere. The room was white and there were screens on one side. There was…there was something wrong with the lights.” He glanced at the Angel, as if wondering if he had gotten that bit right. “Not all forms of energy are good for Angels, you see. Time energy is ideal, in the form of a sentient life, and radiation will do in a pinch, but some things are deadly or caustic. Paradoxes, or… I’m sorry, we don’t have a word for this,” he said to the Angel, frowning slightly.

“Try describing it. The TARDIS translation matrix will think of something.”

Rastan glanced at the Angel again. “There’s an…off taste to it. Like…I’m sorry, because this doesn’t make sense to me, but she says, she says its like trying to send a Cyberman back in time.”

“Of course, because Cybermen are already dead.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain later. These lights, what were they like?”

“Bright, and very white. They had a special filament, tasted like copper but not any copper she was familiar with. The energy made her sick, whether she tried to feed off it or not. She got desperate.”

“And eventually escaped,” the Doctor finished for them both. Rastan fell silent, so he took that to mean that the Angel had, as well.

“Doctor…I don’t understand,” Rastan said finally.

“Good, I don’t either,” the Doctor replied. “Something’s missing. Something…important. What is it?” He started pacing, carefully avoiding the belongings of those who once lived there.

“You said the marks were fresh, what do you mean?” He stopped and looked at Rastan, with a look resembling terror and wonder all blended together. “Doctor, who is she?”

“Her name is Chaos.”


	5. Chapter Four

Rastan watched the Angel for a few moments before looking at the Doctor. “A-are you shitting me?” he asked in a low voice. Chaos? He’d only heard about her, the only being in the universe the Angels submitted to. It was as if they despised the concept of worship or veneration completely, but for one single individual in the whole of time and space. And from the sounds of things, her situation wasn’t looking so good right now. “Chaos. _The_ Chaos.” The Doctor nodded, as if to say, “Yeah, the real deal,” and Rastan looked at her again.

“I am _so_ sorry I didn’t recognize you sooner,” he said to the Angel.

_Rastan. Shh._

He stared, silent, before looking at the Doctor. “What happens?” he asked. “You’re from the future, right? This all…all works out, right?”

“This doesn’t happen,” the Doctor said, shaking his head slightly. “In her original timeline this doesn’t happen. She carries about her business as usual, without being interrupted, for eons.”

“So something went wrong.”

“Exactly! Something went very, very wrong!” The Doctor approached her again and stopped, holding up his hands and letting his fingertips hover over her stone skin as if he were asking permission for something, or wanting to. Rastan glanced at the Angel and then at the Doctor, nodding. He ran his fingers over her arm, gently and methodically, as if studying something.

“My vision,” Rastan said suddenly, as something clicked. “You said it was a tear in the fabric of space-time, right?”

“Yes, yes I did! I did say that! Good memory!” He snapped and pointed, as if Rastan had said something clever. In his defense, Rastan did have a sense of where this was going.

“What caused it?” he asked.

The Doctor straightened and looked at him. “Oh,” he said slowly. “Ohhhh, that’s a good question. That’s a great question, I love that question. Chaos, I really hate to impose, considering the extremity of your present circumstances, but we’re going to need your help.”

***

Rastan watched the Angel in the glow of a streetlight; they had waited until dark to allow her to move about freely. Rastan could track her movements, and the Doctor followed at his heels. Chaos had yet to reveal exactly what they were looking for, and, according to the Doctor, “It’s likely she doesn’t even know. Temporary Chronological Displacement Disorder. Her understanding of how she got here has probably been wiped from her memory by the event itself.”

“Is that like…to prevent the universe unraveling? If you don’t know a paradox happened you don’t think about it, or something?”

The Doctor frowned. “Something like that,” he said.

Rastan glanced briefly at the Angel before scanning the street on which they found themselves. It looked like any other, and the most he could tell was that they were outside of the Temple District, far from any other Angels. Other than that, he had no idea. Chaos continued down the street, floating in the spaces between the lights as if carried by the wind, but it was clear she had an exact plan in mind. She knew exactly where she was going.

“How do you know her?” Rastan asked the Doctor.

“I met her a long, long time ago, worlds away from this place. I was an ambassador of sorts to her world then. She had something of a fondness for trying to scare me, but never made an attempt on my life, and seemed to forbid the others from trying.”

Rastan bit his lip, almost asking if what they were doing now was perhaps one of the reasons why. The Angel stopped in one of the streetlights, however, and instead he said, “We must be here.”

“Indeed, we must be,” the Doctor replied, turning to one of the nearby buildings, following Chaos’s slightly turned head. Rastan followed him, sensing Chaos probing his back with her quantum sense, or whatever it was. The Doctor passed his device over the door, and the lock sprang open. The door shifted with a heavy, loud metallic creak, and the three of them filed into a dark space that smelled of dust and felt cold and dry. Rastan turned and started feeling for a light switch, finding it next to the door and flicking it. Rows and rows of fluorescent lights lit up an expansive storage space that looked like it held absolutely nothing, and hadn’t in quite some time.

“An abandoned storage unit,” Rastan remarked sarcastically, burying his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Not abandoned,” the Doctor replied, walking over to something on the floor about twenty or thirty feet inside. It was small, standing maybe a foot and a half high, and wider than it was tall. The Doctor bent a little at the waist before crouching, touching it and staring at one of the corners. “This was put here recently.”

“How recently?”

He ran a finger over the top and licked it. “I’d say…within the last three months.”

Rastan noticed something across the floor and walked toward it. The box had been opened, but not very often. “Doctor, look!” he said, holding up something from inside. “Light bulbs.” The Doctor looked at him and straightened, gaping a little. Rastan opened the box and removed the light bulb from it, peering through it. “Looks like a copper filament,” he said.

The Doctor walked over. “Let me see that,” he said, taking the bulb and scanning it with his device. He regarded the light bulb with some awe as he lowered the sonic screwdriver. “The copper’s from Chasm Forge. It’s a special blend, for a very specific result. There are flecks of something else, something…almost radioactive, but not quite…. It’s something else.”

Rastan glanced at the Angel, who had stayed more or less in the same spot since they entered the warehouse. Rather than cover her eyes, she was watching them, or rather the light bulb, intently. He looked back at the Doctor, just as he put that bulb down and stared at the others. “They’ve got a life of nearly a year provided nothing goes wrong, and from the looks of things they intended to keep our friend for a good long while.”

“Who? Better yet, why?”

“Great questions, both of them.” The Doctor moved to wave the bulb in front of the Angel, but Rastan grabbed his wrist to stop him.

“Put it down,” he said. The Doctor looked at him, but obeyed after a moment, slowly lowering the bulb back into the box with other units like it. “Don’t threaten her just to prove a point.” The Doctor stared at him for a moment, and Rastan knew he sounded gentle. That was rather the point. But, the Doctor looked surprised, almost. Rastan released him slowly, and he took a step back, as if form them both. Rastan looked at Chaos a third time and nodded reassuringly, though the lights didn’t flicker and she still hadn’t dared to approach. “Fair enough,” he decided, and he turned to the box. “So, what’s that thing?”

“Oh, that?” the Doctor asked, as if he was incredibly easily distracted. “That is a thing!” he declared proudly, hands in the air and beaming.

“…What does it do?”

“I don’t know.”

_That’s helpful,_ Rastan thought, rolling his eyes a little toward the Angel. “Is it anything to do with why she’s not in her time stream anymore?”

“That’s good. You’re full of good things, Rastan.” The Doctor crouched to study the box again, and Rastan looked at the Angel.

“I know you don’t know him yet, for reasons not fully understood by, well, anyone, but I’ve got a strong feeling he’s always like this.”

“Rastan, can you come here?” the Doctor asked. Rastan turned and walked over to the box, examining its general smooth, featureless surface. The Doctor was staring at a couple of small buttons under a panel that had somehow come open, as if on a pair of hinges. There was an old-school lever, as well as a couple buttons of various sizes and prominence.

“Is this a joke?” he asked, looking up at the Doctor.

“If it is, it’s not my idea.” He pushed the buttons and held them, flipping the switch with his free hand. Rastan shifted out of the way of his runaway elbow as he watched. The box hissed, and a strange steam or smoke flowed out from the edges and corners. Rastan shuffled back, and the Doctor straightened and took a step away from the box. Slowly, the sides of the box unfolded, spreading out in a pattern and unfurling, like a mechanical, abstract flower. From within, several mechanical arms unfurled, curling into something resembling a sphere before turning slowly on a rotating platform. A pulse shot through the arms, manifesting in a form almost like lightning, as the spinning quickened. The energy created a force field within the arms, a bubble of energy while a few bolts escaped from the field. One landed in the light fixtures, frying a whole row instantly.

Another bolt nearly missed Rastan’s feet, causing him to yelp and jump back. The Doctor looked at him, and reached to pull him back some more, yelling something about “Out of the way! It’s unstable!” Rastan had only enough time to look at the Doctor, get a last good look at his face, before, in less than a blink, the sky was dark and full of stars, and the air was cool. He gasped, staggering over the damp earth and looking around, fighting to keep from collapsing while he got his land legs back.

***

The Doctor stared at where Rastan had once been standing, right next to him, where now an Angel stood, arm in the air, pointing. “What did you do?” he asked. “Where did you take him?” Naturally the Angel did not reply. He edged away from the destabilizing device as quickly as he could while keeping his eyes on the Angel, and he raised the sonic to his mouth. “Rastan! Rastan, come in! It’s the Doctor!”

“Doctor!” Rastan replied after a moment. “What time do you have?”

He glanced briefly at his watch. “Eight fifty-three.”

“OK good, I have that, too. And it must still be the same day, otherwise this probably wouldn’t be able to work. If I understand my time-travel right, that is.”

“Generally, but time is weird.”

“Do I need to know?”

“Not generally. Spot a constellation and tell me where it is.”

“Uh…alright…” Rastan said. “Here we go, Orion, just risen over the horizon, the last star balanced over the trees.”

“His knee?”

“I…I think so, yeah.”

“Good, sounds about right for this time period. Where are you?”

“I’m on a street somewhere, two lane. I see lights in the distance, to the south.”

“Good, go toward those. There’s a good chance that’s a city.”

“A good chance?”

“I’m presuming you’re still on Earth?”

“Feels like Earth, smells like—wait, why are you asking me so many questions?”

“An Angel touched you. I’m trying to determine your exact chronological placement. It seems you’ve only been moved in space, when she could’ve sent you back in time as well, but she didn’t. And I don’t know why, and that’s probably going to bug me!” Meanwhile the machine began rattling violently, causing the floor to shake under his feet. The whole building shook all over, as if it threatened to break apart around him. “Rastan, I need to go, the building’s falling apart. That machine, whatever it is, is destabilizing, and it’s taking this whole building with it.” Then, and only then did he duck and run for the door, so that the Angel was unobserved.

***

“Meet me at the Temple,” Rastan replied. “If and when I get there.”

“I’ll give you a day,” the Doctor replied. Rastan could hear his feet pounding the pavement.

“Hope I’m there sooner.” Rastan hung up and started down the street, glancing all around for any sign of headlamps but not finding much luck at first. He took a deep breath and continued down the road for several minutes before noticing his shadow blooming to life before him. He stopped and turned as a long-haul truck approached over the hill. He stepped into the road, waving both of his arms to flag it down, and the truck’s breaks groaned to a stop, the air breaks hissing. Rastan jogged over and pulled himself up, and the driver rolled the passenger side window down. “What’re you doing way out here?” the driver asked.

“Excuse me,” Rastan replied, and he pointed southward. “Is that London?”

“Yeah, last I checked. Why?”

“I need a ride, if you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, sure, where to?”

Rastan opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. “Třináct Andělů Temple,” Rastan replied. “In the Czech District.”

“You’re one of those guys, eh?”

“After a fashion. Can’t help it, being born and baptized in the Temple.”

“So what’re you doin’ way out here?”

“Good question.” Rastan settled into the seat as the driver put the car back into gear and continued down the road.

“So, got a name?”

“Yeah, Rastan,” he replied. “You?”

“Eric.”

“An old name. Family name?”

“Yeah, I guess. Lots of Erics in my family. You?”

“Father’s family from the Czech Republic, mother’s family from Slovakia. Two hundred years later weird things happened to language, especially away from the Old Countries.”

“What happened?”

“What else? Russia.” Rastan smiled a little, and Eric returned the favor.

“So lemme guess, your family, and thousands of Czechs and Slovaks like them, run to London, bringing those damned statues with them.”

“The statues came later,” Rastan said. “Only by a few years, but later nonetheless. Those people must’ve been the perfect target, terrified, many worried their God had abandoned them…” Rastan shook his head a little.

Eric looked at him briefly before returning his attention to the road. “Nobody’s an atheist in a foxhole,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised they did some wacky religious shit after having to run from Russia.”

Rastan smiled a little. “Something about it stuck around, so it must work for somebody, probably the Angels. For the record, they aren’t exactly statues. They’re only statues when you’re looking at them.”

“Really? Weird.” He shook his head a little and gave a disbelieving smirk. Rastan shook his head in response, smiling a little as he did.

***

The Doctor sat on the temple steps, his hair standing on end a little as his awareness keenly informed him of the Weeping Angels on either side of him and behind him. There were few cars on the streets that night, and even fewer people, so he looked up when he saw the headlamps on the road. He stood and watched as an eighteen-wheeler slowed to a stop in front of the temple, and listened as the air breaks hissed. A few moments later, Rastan hopped out of the passenger’s side, waving to the driver. “Thanks for the lift,” he said as he walked over to the temple steps where the Doctor waited, watching. “So, what the hell happened?”

“Well, for starters, Chaos displaced you in space, presumably to get you out of the way while that machine took apart the warehouse,” the Doctor replied. “Which it did, by the way. It generated so much energy that the building fell apart around it. Somehow it’s still standing. I think.”

“You _think_?”

“I haven’t had occasion to go back and check.”

Rastan gave him a look and started up the temple steps. “Where’s Chaos?”

“Lost track of her. She’s probably on her way back. Or something.”

Rastan leaned on the doors and pushed them open. “Did you crack the locks?” he asked.

“No! Yes…”

“Why?”

“In case we need to hide. That machine destabilizes time itself. It tears holes in the universe. There’s no telling what could fall out of it, and frankly Weeping Angels are the least of our problems.”

“Was that how Chaos got here?”

“I think so.”

“So, question: Did they target it precisely or was she another accident that they decided to exploit?”

“Good question.” The Doctor followed him into the darkened temple, and watched him light a few candles that cast haunting shadows over the Weeping Angels present. The Doctor looked at each of them in turn before returning his attention to Rastan.

“Should we go back and find out?”

“Tomorrow,” the Doctor replied. “You should get some sleep, as much as you can in a place like this.” He settled into a pew and leaned back, folding his arms across his chest and closing his eyes. Rastan nodded and walked over to the Sanctuary, slipping inside and laying on the floor, a high-pile carpet that Rastan didn’t fully understand. It didn’t much matter anyway. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, ready to turn in for the night.


	6. Chapter Five

Rastan stirred awake in the Sanctuary, rubbing his eyes and sitting up, staring at the Angels. He pushed himself up and moved to the door, slipping out silently and noticing the congregation, filing softly and silently into the main chapel. The acting pontiff stared at him, but he merely shook his head, stepping off the altar and walking to the pew where the Doctor still slept, now lying along it. He shook the Doctor’s leg and, when he looked up, he tilted his head toward the door, continuing down the aisle and burying his hands in his pockets. The Doctor struggled to his feet and followed him, and they left the chapel without saying a word.

“What’re they going to do?” the Doctor asked.

“Same thing they’ve always done,” Rastan replied. “Same service as ever, just with fewer people.”

“Why? They’ve seen how dangerous it is.”

“That’s the thing about faith. Against all evidence, only a little shifting needs to be done, and life returns to normal.”

The Doctor said nothing, and Rastan studied the skyline in the general direction Chaos had led them the night before. There was no sign of anything being particularly out of place, at least, until the Doctor pointed it out. “Wait, what’s that?” he asked, pointing at what looked like nothing. Rastan squinted.

“It…looks like a heat shimmer,” he said finally.

“Energy shimmer,” the Doctor corrected, and without a word he started toward it at a run. Rastan started a little and took off after him.

“Are you mad!” he yelled, and it was not the first time he thought or voiced such a thing.

“If something is happening I like to be close to it!” he replied over his shoulder.

They continued to run toward the shimmer of energy or heat, weaving through the streets. Rastan remembered them pretty well, and was able to keep up, and he pulled the Doctor back from something. The building had been absolutely leveled, almost turned completely into powder, and the area was absolutely swarming with Weeping Angels. The Doctor stared, awestruck. “How many are there?” he asked. “There must be thousands.”

Rastan nodded. “This is just a nexus for them,” he said, stepping away from the Doctor. “There are many more, all over the planet.”

“How?”

“Maybe it’s that thing, ripping open space and time.” Rastan took a few steps toward them, reaching out feelers. “Doctor…there’s something else.”

“What?”

“Remember that thing I said about resonance? How it’s like an Angel fingerprint?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“All these Angels…they’re identical.”

***

The Doctor finished his scan of a few of the Angels and turned to Rastan. “The same Angel,” he confirmed. “Fractalizing, reiterated all over time and space, the whole universe, one Weeping Angel.”

“But…that’s a bad thing,” Rastan said, taking a step toward him. “That’s too strong a paradox, any other Angel would be wiped out just by proximity.”

“Of course, if you wanted to wipe out the Angels across all of time and space…that’s how you do it.”

“But what if that’s not it? What if whomever it is wanted this for something else?”

“Ooo, good, and the Angels are just a side effect.”

“Yeah, of us fucking with it.”

“But how did the first iteration of Chaos get here?”

Rastan shrugged. “Byproduct of someone else fucking with it?”

“Could be. Or maybe…”

“…What?”

“Maybe it’s a byproduct they decided to exploit, but maybe it was on purpose. Someone deliberately extracted her from her timeline for some purpose, and the machine destabilized because of how inherently temporally chaotic the Weeping Angels are. They send people back in time, for God’s sake.”

“And then the second time someone turned it on…”

“One Weeping Angel is infiltrating the universe.”

“So how do we stop it?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know.”

***

Rastan picked his way around the Angels to the machine, which, he noted, was still running. There were deep cracks and crevices in the concrete floor beneath it, and it was shaking like some kind of overloaded washing machine. The ball of energy within wobbled back and forth like so much plasma, in zero gravity and with almost no surface tension, like it would be ripped apart at any moment, but it wasn’t. Not yet, at least. Rastan didn’t want to find out what would happen if it did rip apart under tidal forces. He took a deep breath and looked around at the ruins of the building, that which was still standing and solid, and picked his way around Angels until he found the remains of a beam just wide enough to fit into his hands. He picked it up and returned to the machine, raising the beam like a bat and adjusting his grip on it, as if preparing to hit a home run. He swung first at one of the limbs of the machine, striking it but not dislodging it from its place. Part of the beam grazed the energy field and disintegrated. He stepped back and stared at the part of the beam that used to be there. “Oh shit, not good,” he said, dropping the beam and taking a step back. The Angels had widened their circle around the thing, as if they themselves were terrified to get close to it. “I don’t blame you,” he said to the nearest one.

He took another step back, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, listening to the Angels all around him, all identical at the resonance level. He tried to open his mind to them, and met with a barrage of questions, over and over and over again: _Where am I? Where am I? WHERE AM I?_

“London!” he shouted, turning to the ones behind him. “You’re in London, England, on the planet Earth, and it is June twenty-seventh, two thousand two hundred and fifty-seven, and _the goddamned universe is ending_!” The questions ceased. Rastan took a few deep breaths. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell,” he said finally.

“What the hell are you thinking?”

Rastan turned, startled that the voice didn’t belong to an Angel. Instead the Doctor was approaching, ducking around the wings and stumbling a little toward him. “That thing is dangerous! It could’ve killed you! It could’ve fractalized you all over time and space!”

“But it didn’t!” Rastan shot back. “Besides, why do you care so much? We barely know each other!”

“I’ll have you know I have a soft spot for this planet and every life on it, and I am very invested in making sure it survives whatever the universe has to throw at it.”

Rastan scoffed. “Well that makes one of us.”

“Someone has to!” he replied. “Someone has to care.”

“Why? You just solve a crisis or stop an invasion and then…leave. Everyone knows that’s how you work.”

The Doctor paused then, regarding Rastan unevenly, before turning to the Angels. “Right then,” he said, as if changing subjects. Rastan bit his tongue and rolled his eyes fiercely, meeting the Doctor’s back with an obscene hand gesture.

“Jagger,” he said under his breath.

“I heard that!”

“Because of course you did!”

The Doctor hummed and studied the Angels, particularly one of their wings, as if something had caught his attention. _This guy is so easily distracted,_ Rastan thought, wrinkling his brow and frowning. _People trust their planets to this asshole?_

“Rastan!” he said. “What are they saying to you, all these iterations of Chaos?”

“I got them to stop. They wanted to know where they were. Many of them were…scared. Confused. They still are. It’s the same resonance, but it’s…it’s a mess.”

“Of course. She was doing other things with her time, at each of these moments of her life. She wasn’t expecting this, and doesn’t know how to process it.”

“Someone is running about through her life story…and we don’t know if it’s an accident or on purpose. We can’t switch that machine off, far as I can see, so this is only going to get worse until…what? You do something clever?”

“Something like that, yes,” the Doctor said cheerfully as he poked his head out from behind a pair of Angel wings. It was as if their prior incident had never happened. He returned to what he was doing, and Rastan simply stared at him, dumbfounded. He sighed, bit his lip, and turned, resting his hands on his lips as he scanned the scene where the building had fallen. Was it just him or…had more Angels appeared—more copies of the same Angel? He stared at them and frowned. The resonance continued to become more chaotic and disoriented.

“It’s getting worse!” he yelled to the Doctor after a moment, letting his voice rise in volume as he spoke.

The Doctor poked his head out from behind an iteration of Chaos, and then he walked toward Rastan’s position. “The whole universe, one Weeping Angel,” he repeated. “It starts here. This is the nexus where the universe ends.”

“Do you even know what you’re talking about half the time?”

“Of course I do.”

“Do you know how to stop this?”

“No, not yet. I need to figure out why and how it started, first.”

Rastan frowned. “Doctor…whomever you are, I’m not sure about you,” he said. “I’m almost sure you’re a space alien of some type, which makes you better qualified to deal with this shit than anyone else.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure about your friends, but you’re the most qualified for dealing with them,” the Doctor replied.

“Thanks. But I mean to say that…that you’re the best we’ve got right now and I’m scared, I’m scared with them and for them and I’m probably the only way you could possibly know what they’re thinking or feeling right now. And your ideas about saving the humans still bothers me because all my fellow man has ever done is hurt me. You leave all the time so you don’t see it, but it’s true, and it’s there. You don’t think humans can despise each other so much but they absolutely can.”

“Don’t talk to me about how humans can hurt each other,” the Doctor replied darkly. Rastan met his gaze steadily; it didn’t even occur to him to be afraid.

“Don’t talk to me about how great they are, either,” he said steadily. They watched each other for some moments.

“Let’s save the universe first,” the Doctor said. “Then you can be misanthropic in peace. Deal?”

Rastan nodded. “Deal.”


	7. Chapter Six

The swarm of Weeping Angels resembled a forest, packed in tight and almost impossible to navigate safely unless you knew exactly what you were doing. The only difference between them was that usually, new trees didn’t appear every second, and you were reasonably assured of finding the end of the forest at some point, provided you didn’t starve to death or get killed by something before then. As Rastan picked his way through the swarm, he realized he had no such assurance, and it was quickly becoming apparent that they were taking over London just by sheer numbers. He heard the sounds of car alarms and general chaotic traffic—people were starting to take notice, and to panic. He glanced through the thicket of Angels and spotted the Doctor, also weaving through them, and then looked ahead, trying to find a clearing or some such around the nexus, or even a slight letting up.

“How long have we got?” Rastan shouted to the Doctor.

“This is a fractal of sorts,” he shouted back. “Fractals are exponential.”

“Doesn’t answer the question!”

“We don’t have a lot of time at all! We might not even make it to tonight!”

“Any ideas?”

The Doctor stopped suddenly, taking a deep breath of something that didn’t smell like Angels, and breathing heavily after that. Soon after, Rastan emerged into what looked like a clearing, or at least a space where much of the Angel fractal had been contained, for now. Beyond were smatterings of Angel images like polka dots, interspersed with individual Angels Rastan could easily pick out. He took a deep, relieved breath at the feel of them. One of them caught his attention, and he looked over, at the Angel he’d had his tryst with. Why are you so worried? he asked himself, but he approached nonetheless and, to the Doctor’s surprise, gave the Angel a hug.

“The universe is ending,” he whispered into the Angel’s ear. “Lady Chaos is dying, and bringing down everyone else with her. She didn’t plan this, someone else did, and it might not even be a plot, just a side effect. Will you help us?”

Rastan stepped back, watching the Angel and waiting for a response. “Who’s this?” the Doctor asked.

“The one I told you about,” Rastan replied, gesturing to the bandages on his head. Something caused him to look at them again, and he nodded. “They’re in. Insofar as they get something out of it, presumably food and not to die due to the paradox.”

The Doctor looked from one to the other. “What do you know?” he asked the Angel after a moment.

Rastan glanced at the Angel. “Not much, they said, but they know Kirby Callaghan knows something.”

“Your manager?”

“Former manager. Looks like we need to pay him another visit, and start asking different questions.”

***

Kirby sighed a little as he stood from the chair in the back of the superstore. “Can I help you?” he asked, watching Rastan and the detective.

“Our investigation has taken something of a turn,” the detective replied. “We need to ask you a few more questions.”

“Why do you keep dragging him along?” Kirby asked. “People are looking for him.”

“I know. I’m keeping him safe, and in return, plus a decent stipend, he’s my expert.” Kirby nodded. “Now then, as to those questions. Who is Arthur Ellerhard?”

“Generally the CEO of Ganymede,” Kirby replied. “He’s…he’s an odd duck, Inspector. He’s what Rastan would call a jagger.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He comes by maybe once a year, under the pretense of inspecting the place and making sure it’s up to standards. No one knows what standards those are, mind you, so it’s a very bad pretense. In any case, nobody really knows what Ganymede does, but I can tell you Ellerhard was always interested in the back storage room, where we keep things like the supplies for the bathrooms, and cleaning stuff.”

“I know where that is,” Rastan said, and the detective looked at him.

Kirby shrugged. “Why not check it out?” he asked simply.

“I think we will,” the inspector said, fiddling with his antiquated pocket as if returning something to it. Probably that equally old leather wallet with his credentials in it. Kirby nodded a little and leaned forward, reaching down and pulling an old metal key off a hook, handing it to the inspector.

“Good luck,” he said.

Rastan frowned, but the detective seemed undeterred by Kirby’s statement.

***

The Doctor and Rastan walked side by side across the superstore to the back room. Rastan knew the floor layout like the back of his hand, but tried to hover away from customers who thought he still worked there. He didn’t have time to help anyone find toilet paper, check them out, and fall back into routine as normal, to say nothing of the inherent desire he felt to not do those things. If he could forget this place, he would be quite happy.

They reached an old, battered door, and the Doctor held up the key, sliding it into the lock and turning it, gently pushing the door open. Rastan followed him into the room, which looked just as it always did: one room where they kept some of the beverages, and another where they kept lots of paper products that helped the staff keep this place running. The Doctor looked around the room. “What are we looking for…?” he asked, as if to himself. Rastan glanced at him and then stepped into the other chamber, leaving him to think and come to whatever conclusions he may. He kept his arms folded across his chest and studied a collection of paper towel rolls, gently drumming his fingers against his arm and sighing a little. He looked idly at the far wall and then did a double take. Rastan walked over and scrutinized the wall; something seemed out of place, though he couldn’t quite place it.

“Doctor!” he said, raising his voice a little to get the man’s attention. The Doctor poked his head through the doorway.

“Yes?”

“Check this out.” Rastan waved the Doctor over, still watching the wall. When he really thought about it, he kind of understood what it was wrong. It was…too close, closer than it usually was. “It looks like a false wall of some kind.”

The Doctor scrutinized it for a moment. “It does,” he said softly. Then he straightened and moved to pull it away. Rastan stood and moved to help, and they both found that the panel of fake wood fell away easily, as if it had been recently opened. “What an odd place to hide something,” the Doctor observed. “But then, how else do you ensure a secret than by putting it somewhere no one would expect?”

“It’s clever,” Rastan agreed, as they set the huge panel aside, revealing a pristine white wall with a door set deep within it and designed like something Rastan saw on an ad for a starship venturing out into space like a leisure cruise for the ultra-rich. He watched the Doctor approach the door and scan it with his screwdriver; after a few moments the door gave a hiss, like an airlock releasing. Then, the door slid open, revealing an equally pristine white stairwell, descending into a white oblivion. Rastan tried to remember what was behind the stock room, what masked the surface-level structures that clearly led to a secret basement.

The Doctor started down the stairs, and Rastan looked at him, almost doing a double take before following him. Their steps echoed against the walls in dull thumping sounds, and they reached the basement proper. It was one room, with a long medical table with broken straps. On one wall, in an arc around the table, was a wall of almost haphazardly placed screens. The Doctor hummed. “Now, that is interesting,” he said. Rastan walked around the table, staring at the broken straps and remembering the first iteration of Chaos: starving, and telling him how she had escaped. He remembered the broken chain, and his eyes found the one dirty patch of the room, at the corner between the floor and one of the walls. There was a broken iron ring attached to it. He squatted next to it and studied it. Then, he stood and looked around the rest of the room while the Doctor studied the monitors. Rastan noticed something hidden in the corner of the room, cracks over the white walls, and a long, slender hole carved into the wall, as if something immensely powerful and desperate had tried to escape. Behind him, he heard the Doctor scanning the light bulbs.

“Copper filament from Chasm Forge, with those same flecks in it,” the Doctor finally said, and Rastan stood and looked at him.

“She was here,” he said, nodding to the hole in the wall.

“So, this is where they kept her hostage.”

“Explains why Ellerhard took such an interest in this place.”

“The question is what did he want.”

“What did you get off the monitors?”

“Nothing useful. They were monitoring the Angel, that’s for sure. It’s as if someone was trying to bypass the quantum-locking mechanism and get a glimpse of the Angel’s true form.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Rastan watched him turn slowly about an imaginary axis, watching his sonic screwdriver as he held it aloft. It made a continual buzzing noise. Rastan looked at the rest of the room, scrutinizing the walls and the outlets where the monitors hooked up, drawing power from a dedicated power grid installed in London by Ganymede. The walls were covered in scratches, barely discernible against the pristine surface. He gently ran his hands over them, turning his hand while his fingertips found the starting points of one of the sets of scratches. He felt the echoes of the resonance left by the starving, pained, desperate Angel struggling for freedom. He lowered his hand and straightened, looking back at the Doctor, who had just pocketed his sonic screwdriver and was watching Rastan.

“What?” Rastan asked.

“I’d ask you the same thing.”

“I’m just trying to figure this out, same as you are.”

“Your method is…unusual.”

“I don’t see how it’s any better or worse than yours,” Rastan said with a shrug, and he turned back to the wall, gently running his fingers over the scratches. Some matched the pattern of a human hand, but many others did not. Subconsciously his hand went to the bandages on the back of his head, where he’d been nearly scalped. He knew the Doctor was watching him, and he stepped away from the wall and looked up. Now that he knew what to look for, it seemed the scratches went up almost ten feet. “It looks like she checked the whole room before finding that weak spot over there and tearing it apart so she could escape. It can’t have taken very long, but she was weakened quickly by whatever is in those light bulbs. Like it…drained her energy.”

“Ohh, that’s clever. That’s a clever little plan.”

“Something’s missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kirby said Ellerhard comes here every year. This has only been going on perhaps a few months.”

“Setup,” the Doctor said simply, and Rastan straightened and looked at him. “He wanted to make sure everything went well for whatever he was planning.”

Rastan merely stared, saying nothing. The Doctor had a great point, and if he was right—and he probably was—it meant Ellerhard had been planning whatever he was planning for quite some time now.

“Which means it isn’t an accident. He deliberately plucked Chaos from her time stream, sapped her energy, and tried to detect her true form. The only thing I can’t figure out is why.”

“The only thing I want to know is what you’re doing down here.” The Doctor and Rastan turned at the sound of the strange voice, and Rastan paled at the sight of the visitors. Ellerhard was a squat man, with a noticeable gut in a suit that might have fit a couple of pounds ago but now made him look a little like a stuffed sausage. He had a large bald spot on his head, and what little hair he had left was mostly grey, with a couple of spots of black. He had a matching moustache. Rastan’s eyes went to the bodyguard, a tall, muscular man in a black suit with his hands clasped loosely in front of him. This man’s suit fit much better, and Rastan had no trouble believing that he could annihilate them both without so much as rumpling or creasing it unintentionally. “Well?” Ellerhard demanded. Rastan glanced over their shoulders and tried to hide a smile as he noticed a flickering light at the top of the stairwell. He looked at the Doctor, wondering what lie he was going to pull out of a hat to get Ellerhard to stand down.

“You must be Mr. Ellerhard. I’m the Doctor.”

Well, that was a surprise.

“Doctor?” Ellerhard scoffed. “Doctor of what?”

“To be quite honest, sir, I don’t believe he’s ever even been to medical school,” Rastan said with a shrug.

“Of course not, I went to the Time Lord Academy, much more important,” the Doctor replied, pocketing his sonic device once again. “Now,” he added louder, adjusting his suit jacket. “What on Earth do you aim to do with a Weeping Angel?”

“Not just any Weeping Angel,” Ellerhard couldn’t help boasting. “The most powerful creature in the universe.”

“Yes, but why?”

Rastan glanced at the stairwell again, finding his lover standing at the top, staring down at the scene below. He couldn’t help but smile this time, but it fell when he realized that the Angel couldn’t get too close to the lights without placing herself at risk. It also meant, he noted, that they were all, essentially, trapped in a room.

“A Weeping Angel is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.”

“So you know what you’re dealing with.”

“Exactly.” Ellerhard walked slowly around the table, and reached over to switch on the monitors, displaying the data they had gathered on Chaos. “Imagine if we could harness that power.”

“It would never work, Angels despise being controlled.”

“Oh, no no no,” Ellerhard said with a laugh and a shake of his head. “I never wanted to control one of these creatures. I needed it weak, and I needed a way to kill it. Arrangements have been made for everything else.”

“Everything else? What does this everything else constitute?”

Above them, something groaned, but the Doctor and Ellerhard seemed not to notice. Rastan looked at the ceiling, examining it for new cracks, before glancing at the stairwell. His alien one-time lover might be his safety, provided he could slip the guard, or trick the guard. He looked back at Ellerhard again, and found that he was laughing. “Oh, Doctor. There were some things man was not meant to know.”

“I’m not a man. I’m an alien,” the Doctor retorted expertly.

“And Jovanich?”

“I think he’s part alien, too. After all, he hangs about with Weeping Angels.” Ellerhard looked over his shoulder at Rastan, who nodded and shrugged a little by way of confirmation. “So tell me, what do you need a Weeping Angel’s corpse for.”

“Oh, not the corpse. All that energy, all the…accumulated lifetimes of potential energy.”

“They consume it all,” Rastan interrupted. “They use it, it fuels their own biology. You don’t…kill a person to harvest a burger they ate when they were three! That’s not how it works.”

“He’s right, much of that energy is already consumed by the end of the day. There’s no point.”

“But…” Ellerhard said, holding up his finger, “in very rare cases.”

“Well you picked the wrong point in Chaos’s time stream for that!” the Doctor replied sharply, marching toward him. The ceiling groaned again, slightly louder this time.

“That’s what the machine was for.”

“So you destroyed her timeline on purpose! Do you realize what you’ve done?! You’re going to destroy the universe! And for what?” Rastan flinched at the Doctor’s tone. “Power?”

“A device!” Here they almost spoke over each other. “It will revolutionize the industry! Change how things are done!”

“Artificial intelligence?”

“Even better.”

“Gus!”

Then a silence fell over the room, as the Doctor realized what he just said. Ellerhard realized it too, judging by the look on his face and the pallor that had overcome him. Rastan wondered if now was a bad time to bring up the creaking sounds, just as one came, cutting through the silence and finally drawing the attention of the men, as they both looked up. “What was that?” Ellerhard asked.

“Rastan, what’s it like up there?” the Doctor asked, looking at Rastan. Rastan glanced at the Angel at the top of the stairs, but she disappeared, replaced by three or four others clustered tightly together.

“Oh, shit,” Rastan replied, taking a few steps back. “I think the ceiling is going to cave in.”

“Oh no,” the Doctor said, looking back at the ceiling. “That’s bad.”

“What’s happening?” Ellerhard demanded, agitated.

“The thing you did, pulling Chaos out of her own timeline, created iterations of her all over space and time, and they’re going to suffocate or crush out everything else!” Rastan replied. “Happy yet?”

Ellerhard looked at Rastan, dumbstruck. He looked as though this was completely unforeseen and he had no idea what to do with that information. Rastan glared for a moment, before a crack formed in the ceiling and began spreading to either edge of the room. By then the ceiling had noticeably buckled under some weight. “To the walls!” the Doctor shouted, and Ellerhard and Rastan quickly rushed to do as he said. Rastan pressed his back hard against the cold, marred walls just as a large section of ceiling caved in, taking much of the stock room with it. Almost two dozen Weeping Angels fell into the room, packed so tightly they appeared fused together. They looked wholly ineffective, and Rastan realized they needed to stop this now, for Chaos’s sake.

“Drilling Ellerhard can wait!” Rastan said, and he rushed for the stairs. He couldn’t pick his way through the Angels, but he did manage to jump and grab hold of what was left of the stock room floor. He scrambled to his feet with some effort and edged along the walls to the door.

And he gasped.

The superstore was absolutely full of Angels, to the panic and terror of the employees and the customers. “Oh, this is such a blow to business,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. He ran through the store, weaving through Weeping Angels that seemed to pack closer together, against their own will. He wanted to somehow reassure them that it would be alright, but he had nothing. He finally burst out the front door, to millions more Angels, it appeared. London was overrun, and for once, completely by accident.

***

The Doctor scrambled up to the stock room, apologizing to the Angels he used to balance himself as he reached for the stock room floor. He followed Rastan’s general path, gaping at the Angels. When Ellerhard finally, breathlessly hauled himself onto the still-stable storeroom floor, all he could manage was, “Oh, God.”

“There are billions more outside, and counting,” the Doctor replied. “Come on.” He took off after Rastan, and Ellerhard couldn’t help but stare at him. However, he saw no choice but to follow. If this continued, his establishment would be destroyed, and God knew what else with it.

“Somebody please explain to me what the hell is going on!”

“Oh good, you said please. I didn’t think you were capable,” the Doctor replied as the two of them reached the front door. “What’s going on is you created a fractal.”

“A what?”

“A deadly one, in quantum space, that iterates as infinite copies of one Weeping Angel, to the point where they kill every other Angel and completely obliterate the universe.” He walked as he spoke, until he stood next to Rastan. “So,” he said, looking at Rastan. “What’s your plan?”

***

Rastan started a little at the Doctor’s voice, though it was good to hear it. “D-destroy the machine,” he finally said. “It caused all this, we have to either destroy it or switch it off, and I won’t feel better until it can never turn on again.”

The Doctor nodded and started weaving through the Angels. Rastan followed him, and Ellerhard tried to, but the Doctor simply said, “You stay here.” To Rastan’s surprise—such that he almost ran into one of the Angel copies—Ellerhard obeyed. He righted himself fairly easily and turned to rush off after the Doctor, toward the energy beam that represented the machine that currently threatened all of time and space.

The Doctor stopped them suddenly at the edge of the ring of Weeping Angels, the clearance they instinctively gave to the device. The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver and fiddled a bit with some of the settings before marching over to the machine. Rastan followed, but by the time he got there the Doctor was kneeling in front of it, passing the screwdriver back and forth over the device and the increasingly unstable bubble of energy contained within its arms. “I don’t know what you’re doing but I hope it’s helping.”

“Trying to.”

Rastan rummaged about through the wreckage for another pipe, in case the Doctor’s clever scheme and almost certainly alien technology failed him. But, by the time Rastan returned to the Doctor’s side, ready to strike, something happened. Either it was a matter of time or the Doctor’s doing, and he wasn’t quite sure though suspected a combination of both, the energy bubble contained by the machine finally exploded outward. Both Rastan and the Doctor shielded their faces with their arms as the strange light rushed past them. The pipe in Rastan’s hands clattered to the floor. Then, the light rushed back again, back toward the machine, and collapsed into a singularity within the arms of the machine. In the silence there was only the hiss of the broken machine, filling the area with smoke. Rastan coughed and waved some of it away from his face. “What did you do?”

“I bypassed the main systems and triggered an emergency shutdown,” the Doctor replied, straightening and dusting himself off. “That will stop the iterization of the Angels for now.”

“For now?”

“That still leaves the billions across all of time and space to set right.”

Rastan turned and looked at the ring of Angels, the clearance they had given the machine. “How do we find the original?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Ask them?”

“OK, how do we get her back? Surely that would set this right, yeah?”

“I have a ship. I can settle it.”

“A…a ship? So you are an alien.”

“And a time traveler.”

“An alien time traveler.” The Doctor nodded and smiled, as if now Rastan was finally getting it. Rastan wasn’t sure whether to feel insulted or what, so he settled on bafflement. “An alien time traveler,” he repeated under his breath as he turned to the Angels. He cleared his throat a little and closed his eyes, listening to the resonance. It was still a jumbled, chaotic mess. “I am Rastan Jovanich,” he said loudly. “Which one of you called me a quote ‘stupid son of a bitch’?” Then, on cue, he and the Doctor closed their eyes. There was a general rustle, of a large crowd shifting and moving, as if parting for someone. After several moments of silence Rastan opened his eyes, finding one of the Angels standing before him. Part of her wing looked chipped, or damaged, like something had broken off of it. Maybe she had had to free herself. “Were you Ellerhard’s captive?”

_Is that the fat man’s name?_

“Yes.”

_Why do you want him?_

“We’ll deal with him later. Right now we need to set this right.”

_How?_

“We’re hoping putting you back in your proper time and place will work.”

_Hoping?_

“Yeah, I don’t…really…understand time travel.”

_Clearly._

Rastan scoffed a little and smiled. Chaos was still sassy in spite of everything. “Doctor, how about getting that ship.”


	8. Chapter Seven

It took almost an hour to relocate the TARDIS in the thicket of Angels, but thankfully none of them seemed terribly interested in his blue box and the time energy it contained. He slipped inside with little effort and immediately began toying with the controls, downloading data from the machine into the TARDIS and allowing it to sort out the proper time and place to restore Chaos to. If that wasn’t enough to restore her timeline and get rid of all the iterations of her all over the universe, he didn’t know what would be.

With a flourish, he threw the lever and listened to the TARDIS’s wheezing and grating for a bit while he moved her about in space. A moment later, with a heavy thunk sound, he knew she had landed, and he opened the door.

***

Rastan glanced at the ship as it landed; it resembled an antique blue police box, but he caught a glimpse of something a lot more alien in the moments as the Doctor opened the door and stepped out. “Usually I don’t allow my enemies to board,” he prefaced, and he took a step to the side, holding open the door. He closed his eyes, an open invitation to Chaos. Rastan closed his eyes as well, and felt the shift in the air as she moved. When he felt it was safe to do so, he opened his eyes again and looked at the Doctor and the ship. The Doctor was looking at him expectantly.

“What?” Rastan asked after a moment.

“Well, aren’t you coming?”

“Wait, with you?”

The Doctor nodded somewhat insistently. “Yeah! Someone needs to keep the Angel in line.”

Rastan smirked. Of course he didn’t trust her. He walked over to the ship and stepped through the door, and the Doctor closed it behind them. Rastan gaped up at the ceiling and turned in a slow circle about an axis. “Is this what it’s like to be a Weeping Angel?” he asked excitedly, and it struck him how young he sounded. The Doctor frowned and tilted his head slightly to one side. “Do you seriously think the form you see is really as big as they actually are? You think they’re shaped like that?”

“Well, you know more than I do,” the Doctor conceded as he walked over to the console. “I already input the coordinates, so all we have to do…” He flipped the lever again, and the TARDIS made a wheezing, grating sound once more. Rastan braced himself, expecting a shift in the floor. It was slight, at the most, and after a few moments he straightened again and let himself breathe. His eyes went to the Angel, standing on the opposite catwalk, or what Rastan supposed counted as such, with her hands covering her face. She wasn’t dormant, per se, but he could feel that she was limiting her activity and energy response.

“I think it’s a mark of respect,” he said. “She’s holding off so as not to harm your ship.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor said to Chaos, with a slight bow. “It’s a short journey,” he continued.

Rastan walked over to her, hesitating before gently touching her arm and resting his forehead on hers. He closed his eyes. “We’re fixing this,” he said. “We’re going to fix this. You’re going to be—”

Faster than he could blink, hands covered his head, and he gasped. For an instant he feared he’d been killed, as his vision had shifted around him, revealing snippets of a rocky planet, adrift in the stars and currently with a stunning view of some amazing nebulae. There was nothing he could get a proper fix on, and it was like a million moments trying to fly through his consciousness at once. Finally he was released, and dropped to the floor. Only then did he realize he was still on the TARDIS. He coughed and sputtered a little and looked at the Doctor, who was watching Chaos. “Did I die?” he asked.

“No, no, you didn’t,” the Doctor replied.

Rastan looked at Chaos, her claws out but her face serene as ever. He reached up to his scalp, feeling for any fresh cuts, but there were none.

“This is very important, Rastan. Tell me exactly what you saw!”

“A…a bunch of nonsense!” he admitted. “There was a rocky planet and…it was night. Or always like this. I didn’t see any day stuff. There’s stars and…nebulae. Three. Five, I think. It was all jumbled together. And why does it matter?”

“In case we got it wrong,” the Doctor said softly.

Rastan did a double take. “What?”

“It happens! Sometimes…. I’ve also been known to crash.”

Rastan stared at him for several moments before scrambling over to the railing and grabbing on, intending to hang on for dear life if anything happened. But, as far as Rastan could tell, nothing did. The ship made a heavy wheezing noise and a heavy plunk before falling silent. “Oh, look, we’re here,” the Doctor said, and he checked his watch. “Exactly fifteen seconds following your extraction.” Rastan breathed heavily and slumped against the railing, closing his eyes. The Doctor, reluctantly, followed his lead. They both felt a rush of air as the Angel stepped past them, and when they opened their eyes again, she was gone. “How do they do that?” he asked softly.

Rastan looked up. “Do what?”

“Move through doors like that, without making a sound.”

“Tunneling,” he replied. “They’re quantum beings at heart. It’s not that they walk through walls or anything, just that they…appear on the other side.” The Doctor nodded, as if it made sense.

“So why bother opening doors at all?”

“To be scary. They know it bothers us, and they do it anyway.”

The Doctor walked over to a screen hanging from the central console and stared at it. Rastan glanced up, seeing that it showed the rocky landscape around the ship, with an angel statue standing with her back to them. “What?” he asked, glancing at the Doctor’s face. Something seemed off.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“That this is working?”

“I feel like I’m missing something.”

Rastan frowned. “What would we find if we went back where we came from?”

“I don’t know, and that bothers me.”

“We put Chaos back where she belongs, that should’ve worked.”

“You’re right.”

“So what the hell is the problem?!” Silence fell in the strange man’s strange ship, and Rastan bit his lip a little but only looked away for a moment. He needed this Doctor to know that he stood by the things he said.

But the Doctor didn’t take offense. Far from it. He pulled a lever on his console and said, “Let’s find out.”

***

Rastan listened to the distinctive grating wheezing noise while the ship landed again. “Why does it make that noise?” he asked.

“What noise? That noise?” the Doctor replied.

“Yeah, that noise. Do all these ships make that noise?”

“Yeah, it’s the TARDIS noise.”

“TAR…DIS?”

“Time and Relative Dimension in Space. TARDIS. Also, life.” The Doctor fiddled with switches before walking over to the doors. Rastan hurried along behind him, and they opened the door to…a completely normal parking lot, as if nothing had ever happened.

“It worked,” Rastan said in awe, as he stepped back onto home soil and looked around. There was not an Angel duplicate in sight. “IT WORKED!” he yelled, beaming at the Doctor. He turned to the sky and shouted again. “It worked!” He laughed, turning slowly and taking in the world, a world restored.

_Best stop with that now, or you’ll look like a nutter._

He stopped and turned to the source of the “voice”, and his smile returned to his face. An Angel stood in the wreckage, leaning on one of the few remaining uprights. Rastan ran up to it, throwing his arms around its shoulders. The stone was, naturally, unyielding, so it was somewhat uncomfortable, but he wasn’t paying attention. “OK, I have no idea why I did that,” he said as he stepped back. “But I did kind of give you up for dead, all that fractal paradox-y nonsense.” He gestured somewhat vaguely at nothing.

_You expected me to stick around?_

“Actually no. I’d run, too.”

“You know you look like you’re talking to yourself,” the Doctor said behind him. Rastan smiled at the Doctor.

_He’s right, you know,_ the Angel added.

“What’s her name?” he asked, approaching Rastan and the Angel. “Or his name.”

“False Prophecy,” Rastan replied.

“Of course you’d hang around a group of temples,” the Doctor said with a smirk. “So you two seem kind of tight. I thought it was just a one-time thing.”

“We left it open-ended,” he said at about the same time he got that message from the Angel.

“I see. Nice little arrangement, it sounds like.”

“Yeah, so long as she doesn’t kill me,” Rastan said with a laugh as he took a couple of steps back toward the Doctor. “So, what happens now?”

“I am going to investigate Gus,” the Doctor replied. “You help your temple clean up, I’m sure you lot need some kind of explanation for what just happened.” Rastan nodded.

***

Rastan swallowed, and walked into the large square at the center of his neighborhood, where all the living pontiffs had gathered to contemplate the day’s events. They all stopped and looked at him when he stepped up to the plate, as it were. He glanced at False Prophecy before taking a deep breath and facing the gathered crowd. “Her name was Chaos,” he said. “And what we witnessed was a grave crime committed against her. Simply put, someone tried to kill her.”

“This someone have a name?” one of the pontiffs asked.

“Arthur Ellerhard,” Rastan said after a moment. He knew he was selling out the poor bastard to a bunch of people who would gladly take up arms if the Angels said so, but as of then that point was somewhat irrelevant. There was a rush of conversation amongst the gathered pontiffs, and Rastan waited for them to quiet down. “There’s something else,” he said finally. “He leads a corporation called Ganymede User Systems, and my friend is over there fighting that bastard and a crazy AI. How do I know it’s crazy? That’s what they wanted Chaos for. They wanted to force her to help build their AI. Because the truth is, and I’m sure you know this, their kills are random. It’s not about heaven, but you like to think so because it makes you sleep easy at night.”

The pontiffs fell silent. “It’s not gonna change shit, I know,” Rastan said. “You need your belief because you can’t be afraid. But let me tell you something. The mind of a Weeping Angel, the universe’s most perfect killer, inside of a computer program…I can guarantee you that’s worse. So for now, be afraid of that, but do more. If I know anything about Weeping Angels, and if I know even half that about computers, that man over there is going to need our help.”


	9. Chapter Eight

The Doctor scanned one of the back doors of the London headquarters of Ganymede (which had proudly declared such on the front above the main entrance), and slipped into the building. He walked down the hall, looking around at the doors and the walls, and the architecture in general. The halls were bustling with young people: staffers and entry-level lab techs and interns. He waved down a lab tech and said, “Excuse me! Excuse me!”

The tech stopped. “Yes?”

“Yes, I’m looking for Gus?”

The tech frowned. “I’m…I’m sorry, sir. That’s not….”

“Arthur Ellerhard, then? Where can I find him?”

“Who are you, exactly?”

The Doctor held up his psychic paper. “Scotland Yard,” he said. The tech nodded.

“Right, yes, well.” He cleared his throat. “I…” He cleared his throat again. “Right this way.” He turned and led the Doctor down a corridor to a private elevator. “This will take you directly to his office.”

“Thank you.”

“Um…”

The Doctor glanced at him, lifting an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” he said in a low voice, “but there’s a thing up there. It’s sentient. I think it used to be a computer, but it doesn’t respond to anything like a computer does.”

“How does it respond?” the Doctor asked, equally softly.

“Like a monster.” With that the tech turned to walk away.

The Doctor looked at him. “What’s your name?” he called.

The tech stopped and looked back. “Andrew, sir,” he said with a smile.

“Keep your head down, Andrew.” The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver. “I’m about to go poke a beast.” The Doctor grinned at Andrew and then turned, scanning the elevator and forcing the doors that way.

***

The Doctor watched the elevator’s rise and hummed a little to himself, tapping his sonic screwdriver against his thigh rapidly, somewhat impatiently. The elevator reached its destination in a little under two minutes, surprisingly fast for the height of the building and what looked like slightly older technology for the area. The doors opened upon a white expanse that lacked windows and curved about in a way that reminded him a little of the TARDIS. On one wall there was a crisp desk that, on closer inspection, looked like a screen of some type. He walked over to it and studied it, and he smiled. Of course Ellerhard would have a desk that doubled as a computer. He held up his sonic screwdriver and pressed a button. It made a piercing, insistent hum, and the computer flared to life. It flashed past his home screen, and the Doctor opened the terminal at once. It ran through a few cycles before opening a program simply known as “G.U.S.”

The Doctor grinned. “Hello, Gus.”

“Who are you?” the familiar voice responded.

He leaned forward. “I’m from your future.”

***

The pontiffs and several congregants of the various sects of the Temple District formed a barrier against the labor police while Rastan led the Angels to the Ganymede building. False Prophecy stood at his side, when he dared to look, but mostly he kept his eyes in front of him. He felt faint hisses of resonance that grew more consistent, though not stronger, as he approached. The final piece of Chaos’s life, the things that were taken from her. He swallowed and continued on. “We’re close!” he said to the Angels, but mostly to himself. False Prophecy gave the impression of wanting to make a snide comment but held off. And, if they were close, that meant the Doctor was there, too.

He took a deep breath as they reached the front of the Ganymede building. The guards raised their weapons and took aim. “Those are useless!” Rastan warned them. “And don’t try shooting me, either.”

“Why not?” one of the guards asked.

“I’ll probably turn into a Weeping Angel. One more than I’m sure you’re ready to deal with today.”

The guards glanced at each other. “What do you want?”

“Access.”

“To what?”

“The office of Arthur Ellerhard.”

“What do you want that for?”

Rastan smiled enigmatically, and the guards looked at each other and fidgeted with their weapons. “Well, aren’t you going to let us in?”

***

“Who are you?” the computer asked again. “Identify yourself.”

“You’re a computer, aren’t you?” the Doctor replied. “Look me up.”

“Why?”

“Oh, you’re self-aware. Good. That means you’re a life form. I’m the Doctor.”

“Doctor. Doctor who?”

“I get that a lot,” the Doctor said with a smile. “Look up the Doctor.” He stood back and waited while Gus carried this command out. “Anything good?”

“Indeed. You are the Doctor.”

“And what does that mean? Hm? What does that mean, to you?”

“You are the defender of this planet.”

“Yes, there’s that. I’m a lot of things, actually. The Daleks detest me, and a lot of other creatures fear me. There’s even a day where I come after you.”

“Are you stalling?”

The Doctor stopped his pacing and grinned at the computer desk. “Yes, I am. Oh, you’re clever. I almost liked you.”

“Are you insane?”

“After a fashion.” The Doctor bent over the computer again. “Tell me your purpose.”

“Explain.”

“Surely you must have a function.”

“I am an experiment.”

“So your function is to be an experiment, to just…exist.”

“I do believe so, yes.”

The Doctor looked up, scanning the opposite wall and lost in thought somewhat. “I don’t believe you,” he finally said, looking at Gus. “Not in the world a month and people are already afraid of you.”

“And what would ever give them that idea?”

“You _know_ what would give them that idea. You’re not a program anymore, you’ve been augmented. Access record logs: GUS.” The computer said nothing, but complied. The Doctor scanned the logs of all activity and alterations made to Gus’s programming, focusing on the most recent events. He found a log entry from a month prior, detailing the capture of the “statue” and the beginning of uploading augments gathered from it into Gus’s programming, followed by a long list of accounts of his progress.

“Have you figured it out yet, Doctor?” Gus asked, and the Doctor jumped. He had dropped his usual half-innocent demeanor, and standing in the center of the office space was a hologram of an Angel.

“The last iteration of Chaos,” he said.

“Clever, clever.”

***

“Get the lights, now!” Rastan demanded, and the nearest guard, against his better judgment, hit the master switch. “Where are the power systems?”

“Main grid in the basement, generators out back, advanced power stations on floors…three through five.”

Rastan turned to the Angels and nodded to them. “Can’t let them help you unless they get something out of it, or someone will die,” he explained to the guard, as if it were perfectly natural. The guard merely stared at him, and Rastan turned and started across the room as if he could see perfectly.

“Sir!” the guard called. “Night vision?”

“No, thank you,” Rastan simply said, continuing on.

He followed the Angels to the elevator and dug his fingers in himself. With a little help, he forced the doors open. _It’s a long way up_ , said a voice in his mind. He merely nodded and dove for the central rope, beginning the laborious process of pulling himself up.

***

The Doctor regarded the Angel hologram. “Well now,” he said softly, straightening slowly. “I presume you’re Gus.”

“That’s true.”

“But you’re also Chaos.”

“I do not understand.”

“You’re Chaos. You’re the last fragment of her personality, her life. The last peace of her. You know…” He stepped toward the hologram and held up his sonic screwdriver. “I bet I could use that to bring her back. She’d be highly interested in it. I bet she’s still here, looking for you.”

“You lie.”

“Can you prove it?” The computer fell silent, and the Doctor smiled and pressed a button on his sonic.

***

Unbeknownst to Rastan, at about the same time, he felt his whole body falling through space and time, though he was certain he had not moved.

***

The Doctor’s eyes widened as a figure appeared behind the Angel hologram. “Rastan?”

“After a fashion,” Rastan replied, though his voice had an echo-y, distant quality to it.


	10. Chapter Nine

“How did you get here?” the Doctor asked.

“I displaced him. I did it once, didn’t I?” Rastan replied.

“That’s impossible, you’re not here. Are you?”

“He has seen inside my mind, and I have seen inside his.”

“A psychic link, then.”

“Of sorts. But I can’t stay long. The connection is temporary and will burn out his brain sooner or later. It’s a shame I can’t be present in any reasonable length of time, either.”

“So this is your next best option.”

“You sound angry, Doctor, but I don’t intend to hurt him.”

“Why?”

“We have a word for him, it doesn’t quite translate. The best we can come up with is Angel-Speaker. He’s the first in a thousand generations. We would prefer to keep him alive.”

“You need him. But why? You can animate someone’s consciousness if you wish to communicate.”

“That doesn’t always work so well. Not everyone has a window into our world the way Rastan does.”

The Doctor stared for a moment. As unsettling as it was to hear Rastan mention himself in the third person, he reminded himself that they had business to discuss. “Can you remove the fragment of yourself from Gus?”

“Not without help.”

The Doctor looked at the computer screen again and passed his sonic screwdriver over it. “Well if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to isolate it for you.”

“You’ve always been lucky, Doctor.”

“No. Oh, no.” The Doctor shook his head. “Not lucky. Clever. I’ve always been clever, but not always lucky.” He pressed a button on his sonic, but at that moment the hologram flickered, and a terminal opened. The Doctor scanned it and hummed, but he persisted nonetheless. This was going to be tricky. He frowned, deftly sidestepping Gus’s attempts to block him and protect itself. “See this little show he’s putting on right now?” the Doctor asked Rastan. “I knew he would.”

Rastan stepped forward, and the Doctor’s smile dropped a little. He took another somewhat halting step forward, as if Chaos were still trying to figure out how his body worked, and this placed him directly in the middle of the hologram. Rastan himself dropped to the floor almost immediately, and the Doctor ran over to him, scanning him with the screwdriver.

“I told you I wouldn’t hurt him,” Chaos said, this time using Gus’s voice. The Doctor stood slowly and turned to face the computer. The Angel hologram moved slightly, turning his head to look at the Doctor. “I supposed you might need some help.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Revenge, plain and simple. But I’ve nothing against you, or Rastan. And before you try to save Ellerhard, it’s too late for him. It has been for hours.” The computer sparked suddenly and then went dead, with a deep crack down the center width-wise. A few moments later the hologram disappeared, as if Chaos couldn’t sustain the projection, or chose not to. The Doctor walked over and scanned the desk, but there was no sign of Gus. At least Chaos got back the last piece of her, so far as the Doctor could tell. He walked back over to Rastan, and gingerly picked him up.

***

The Doctor found Ellerhard’s home surrounded by Weeping Angels, as if they were standing guard over the heavy, gloomy-looking mansion. He hummed; they didn’t need that many to kill one man. Two Angels stood by the door, hands over their eyes, and the Doctor walked up to it and tried the door gently. It creaked open. He took a deep breath, looked around at the Angels again, and stepped inside. Everything was in order, as if it were just waiting for Ellerhard to come home. But as he reached the living room, he saw that that was not necessary at all.

What was left of Ellerhard lay in a big bloody pulp, a torso and part of a head and so, so very much blood. It soaked the carpet, and there were trails and splatters all the way up the walls, destroying priceless portraits of great people from the times between the 21st century and the 23rd. Blood dripped from candlesticks, and there was even a mess on the ceiling. The Angels positively destroyed this man. Chaos’s words echoed in his mind: ‘It’s too late for him. It has been for hours.’ “You killed him,” he whispered, taking in the scene with a sense of measured horror. “Your loyal servants killed him.”

***

Rastan groaned and reached up to wipe his eyes. His other hand fumbled about to steady himself, and when he cracked his eyes open, he found himself surrounded by vaguely familiar walls. He sat up slowly, his hand cradling his head while he recovered, and he looked at the walls and stained glass again. The congregants of his parish were gathered around him, asking various iterations of whether or not he was alright. He merely nodded and said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

The minister ushered the others back and reached over to help Rastan stand. Rastan leaned heavily on him and nodded his thanks, testing each leg before daring to stand on his own. It took a moment to regain his balance properly, but otherwise everything seemed to be working just fine. He leaned slightly on the back of one of the pews and watched as the minister took a couple of steps back, still watching him. “What happened?” Rastan asked.

“I…no one knows,” the minister said. “Only that that man you’re with carried you in.”

“The Doctor. We’re not…we’re just acquaintances.” The minister nodded. “Presume he didn’t say a word of what happened to me or what we were doing before.” The minister nodded again.

“Just…left you here, asked us to take care of you for a bit until you woke up. We tried to ask why you were unconscious, but he stopped us.”

“Shame. Because the truth is I don’t really remember.”

“Only natural,” said a voice behind him. The minister and Rastan looked up to see the Doctor. “Chaos emits a high-power quantum waveform, completely overwhelmed him. He didn’t stand a chance.” He looked at Rastan. “How’re you feeling?”

“Um…al-alright,” he managed. Truth be told, it could be worse. “What…exactly…happened?”

The Doctor merely tipped his head, and Rastan followed him out into the street. He was less unsteady than he feared, and after a few feet of walking in silence, he said, “You were possessed, for all intents and purposes. Chaos has some sort of mental bond with you and used it to put you in the office, and to speak through you.”

“What did I say?”

“You—she—said that she couldn’t stay long, she’d burn out your brain if she did. She asked for my help dealing with the last of her fragments in Gus’s systems. Gus is still around, by the way. He’s going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people.”

“Something must’ve remained.”

The Doctor nodded. “The second she could she moved from your mind into the image of an Angel. That was when you dropped.” Rastan nodded in response. “She destroyed the computer, shut down Gus, for the moment.” The Doctor paused. “Ellerhard is dead.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “The Angels ripped him apart. D-do they take orders?”

“It’s complicated,” Rastan admitted, as something tickled at the back of his mind. “They recognize Chaos as a leader, many as…theirs.” He blinked away the sensation. “I’m starting to remember, bits and pieces.”

“Try not to remember too much.”

Rastan nodded. “Anyway, it’s weird. There are billions of Angels all over the universe but it’s like they’re…one great big tribe. They’ve got the organization of one and that’s frankly about it.” The Doctor hummed. “Is that interesting?”

“Oh yes. See, so little is known about the Weeping Angels and here I am talking to the one person in the universe who has that kind of insight! She mentioned that, by the way. She called you an Angel-Speaker, but it’s a rough translation of another term.”

“Let me guess, unpronounceable.”

“Something like that. I presume it’s because no other creature in the universe has need for such a word. What do they sound like, by the way?”

Rastan stopped and looked at him for a moment. “Excuse me?”

“The Angels. What does their speech sound like to you?”

“Music,” he said after a moment. “The music of the universe.”

***

They continued along back to the Doctor’s strange ship, the TARDIS. Rastan stood back and studied it a moment. There hadn’t been a box quite like it in centuries, as far as he knew, but he found its design…comforting. He figured that box would be a beacon of hope to anyone who saw it and was in trouble. “Do you like it?” the Doctor asked.

“Y-yeah, I…I mean…” Rastan began, but he cut himself off. “Suppose this means you’re going now, yeah? I mean it’s kind of your thing.”

“As you made me aware.”

Rastan pursed his lips and nodded, remembering their deal. He could now continue to hate mankind in peace, with the universe saved and all that. The Doctor stopped in front of the door to his ship and turned back toward him, taking a couple of steps. “Thanks,” he said, holding his hand out for Rastan to shake, which he did.

“Thanks,” Rastan replied. “So this is it, then.”

“Yeah. This is it.” He turned and walked back to the door, even getting as far as opening it and closing it behind him, before poking his head out of the door. “Unless you want to come with me.”

Rastan blinked. “Come with you?”

The Doctor nodded. “Yeah.” He tilted his head toward the TARDIS. “Get in. If you want.”

“W-where to?”

“Anywhere in the universe. Any-when in the universe. Anything in mind?”

In spite of himself, Rastan grinned. “Let’s go sightseeing!” he said suddenly, taking a few steps toward the Doctor.

“Sightseeing?”

“Yeah. Let’s see some galaxies, and stars, and big things colliding with each other. The dance of galaxies, the great opera of the universe.”

“Keep that poetry. You’ll need it.” The Doctor disappeared inside his ship, and Rastan followed him, being sure to close the door after himself.

“But first, Doctor, does she really have six wings?”

“You wanna meet her?” Rastan grinned.


	11. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took a long time to get around to this but here it is! The long-awaited conclusion to the first fic in the Angel Whisperer series!

The TARDIS wheezed as it landed, and with a heavy plunk it fell silent. Rastan waited a few moments, hesitating before walking up to the door, where the Doctor was already waiting. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked, tilting his head toward the door.

Rastan looked at himself, smoothing over his shirt. “I’m…am I…”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll love it. Come on.” He opened the door and stepped out onto a cold, rocky planet. Rastan followed him, taking a couple of tentative steps and a slow, shaky breath.

_Steady atmosphere, reasonable gravity,_ said a voice in his mind, and he looked up and gasped. The chamber they found themselves in resembled a Gothic cathedral, with towering columns and huge vaulted ceilings, and windows onto the outside world. It was all rocks and stars and the sweeping vibrant colors of a nearby nebula. The chamber was filled with Angels, eyes covered and lining the walls. There was a clear path, with what looked like a purple Persian rug leading up to a pedestal, a huge stone throne. He recognized Chaos at once, though she was much taller than he remembered. It certainly fit the impression she had given him. And, as the Doctor said, she had six wings, splayed out beside her like she was victorious. But then, maybe she was. Restoring one’s own timeline would do that to a girl.

He fiddled a bit with himself, wondering if he should kneel or something, but instead stood next to the Doctor. “Lady Chaos,” he said with a slight bow.

_Doctor. Rastan._

“A…a pleasure,” Rastan said, also bowing slightly.

_Likewise. Always honored to meet people who bother to save my life._ There was a light laugh from the surrounding Angels, which sounded more like nails on a chalkboard than an actual chuckle. Rastan looked at the Doctor and volunteered a translation.

“I imagine you lot don’t find those sorts of people that often,” the Doctor quipped, to another chalkboard chuckle.

_Are you here on business of any sort, Doctor?_

“Oh, no, my friend here just wanted to meet you, see if I talked you up or not.”

_I see._

Rastan looked from the Doctor to Chaos, and at the Angels that surrounded her. “Anything you want to ask her?” the Doctor asked, and Rastan jumped a little.

“Um…”

_Go on, ask me anything,_ Chaos said lightly in his mind.

“That…that thing you did…is it a one-time thing?”

_I can’t do it very frequently, if that’s what you’re asking._

“So that means it’s voluntary. The Doctor kind of implied it…wasn’t…”

_Did he now._

“Where did I say that?” the Doctor asked.

“Implied,” Rastan corrected. “In the temple. Třináct Andělů.”

“Thirteen Angels.” Rastan nodded. “Were there always thirteen Angels in the temple?” He nodded again.

“They’ve been there since the temple’s inception. There were originally thirteen pontiffs, too. Legend said each one could only speak to a specific Angel. Eventually it was slimmed down to one, and…and now they’ll need a new one.”

_You sound sad, and scared._

Rastan nodded. “I am. Sad and scared. That pontiff baptized me, and my brother and two sisters. He baptized my parents, and…oversaw my mother’s journey to heaven. It’s not heaven, I’m sorry.” He shook his head a little. “Somewhere in the past, to live out a sort of normal life, find a new religion.” He swallowed. “I’m worried they’re going to choose me next.”

“We should put that off, then,” the Doctor suggested, and Rastan looked up at him.

“Good idea.”

The Doctor bowed again to Chaos. “We’re off now,” he said. “But we might be back.” Then he disappeared back into his weird blue box. Rastan let himself smile a little, and waved to the Angels as he followed him.


End file.
